The Bodies Are Back: Comics and Gender Explored at Intersection for the Arts

The Bodies Are Back by Margaret Harrison at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco.

Wed, Feb 10 - Sat, Mar 27 | 12pm - 5pm | FREE

"Margaret Harrison, renowned British artist and pioneer of feminist art, revisits the themes of her very early work exploring notions of the human body as an object of sexuality, consumption, and gaze. The Bodies Are Back consists of works on paper that Harrison produced in the late 1960's/early 1970's displayed alongside new works created for this show. In 1971, Harrison's work was instantly met with controversy and antagonism (the London police shut down her first solo exhibition the day after it opened feeling that its contents were too controversial). This controversy caused Harrison to abandon the issues and themes of this series. Now an established artist with work in the permanent collections of major international institutions, she is critically re-engaging with this body of work, continuing the dialogue that she began four decades ago." (more examples of this work here).

Sometime ago Intersection's curator/program director Kevin Chen gave me a peek at his image checklist for this show. It was fascinating to see so many (usually) macho superheroes re-imagined in this way. Anyone studying gender issues in pop culture should check it out (artist bio on Intersection site). New reviews: SF Chronicle/Gate, Bay Area Reporter.

My Zoo Experience: Thoughts About On-line Networks

Many people I know are giving a lot of thought to the ways that on-line social networking sites (Facebook, YouTube, etc) have changed the way people communicate with each other and how they represent themselves when they do it. The massive amount of imagery available on-line isn’t new topic in art, of course. Immediately coming to mind are Deborah Oropallo’s Guise series (this is her Helle’s Belle © 2007) and Elliot Anderson’s Average Landscapes, both of which reused images found on the web (exhibited at the DeYoung in 2007) and Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s astounding digital text piece Listening Post (video of London installation, was part of YBCA’s Dark Matter exhibit, also in 2007).

Exploring these issues of self representation on-online to one’s virtual “friends,” is Christine Webster’s recent piece Transitions (just closed at The Lab). The work consists of a bank of flat screen monitors showing pairs of headshots of people being interviewed in China, the UK and here in San Francisco surrounded by wall projections of images gleaned from the interviewee’s Facebook pages. Artist Clare Szydlowski, who knew the background of the project, told me the stories of how these specific people came to be interviewed, and why they responded to each other the way they did. After hearing their stories, it was fascinating to watch the thread of projected images of families, friends, holidays, parties and other events and wonder why the interviewee choose that particular image and what they were trying to project about themselves.

I have recently been immersed in an on-line exploration of my own. While I use Facebook, Slideshare, LinkedIn and other networks somewhat regularly, I had never been really interested in on-line games. Right around Thanksgiving, an old friend sent me an invitation to try a Facebook game called Zoo World. When I put that innocent looking, big-eyed penguin in “my zoo,” I had no idea that I would be jumping into an obsessive interactive experience. The object of the game is buy (with mostly virtual money) a collection of about 150 animals of different species, various decorations, food and shopping kiosks (hot dogs, carousel, etc…) and that will enable you to pass though 42 levels of various tasks. While there were many different aspects to the game, of interest in this discussion were the ways that the game maximized Facebook’s networking capabilities. Each animal needed a friend assigned as a “zookeeper,” and to raise the value of your zoo and increase the amount of money the zoo was bringing in (to buy animals, etc), a large network of people was needed. Very few people have enough of their own real-world friends to do this, and it’s common practice to add other players found in chat forums dedicated to the zoo game. Eventually, aside from a small core group of real-world friends involved in the game, I was interacting with 120 random people from all over the world. I was fascinated with the way relationships were formed with strangers, and how the community decided on netiquette.

I was blown away by how little people read, or take time to understand anything remotely complicated. The game’s main help page has a running open chat room where players ask for help and offer themselves as zookeepers. Right next to this on the same page is a FAQ that answers many common questions about the game in very straightforward language. Apparently, nobody reads it, as every other question was repeating one answered on the FAQ. The worst one, the one that stunned me, was the number of people who couldn’t figure out what the word “unique” meant (as in buy 10 unique animals). Duh. Literally 1 in 15 would ask this question.

The way the community approved or disapproved of various types of interactions and how the disapproval was enforced (flaming, blocking, exclusion, reporting) was very interesting. The process of trust building and credentialing within the community though groups and chats was very important, as a sort of group hierarchy formed of people who were smart, serious players who would network together to help each other and distribute any perks, cheats or new information. Maybe this will be another paper someday.

Husband Marc will be writing on some of these issues sometime soon, and he will be teaching a class at the law school this summer about legal issues in new technology, including cloud computing, participation in virtual worlds (2^nd Life) and in massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. I’d also like to recommend a great interview with Jeben Berg, Creative Director of YouTube in the Feb 2010 edition of Juxtapoz by Alexander Tarrant (unfortunately not available on-line without a digital subscription, here's his blog on Juxtapoz).

Spring Conferences

The art-icons-comics blog has been taking a little rest over the holidays... more to come soon. In the meantime, I'd like to announce a couple presentations at conferences scheduled for the spring: In mid-February, I'll be presenting on my research into the origins of the arm & hammer emblem at the Pop Culture/American Culture Association's Southwestern conference in Albuqueque, NM. At the end of March, I'll be presenting on the Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983) at the PCA/ACA national conference in St. Louis.
Hope everyone had a happy holiday season!

See Kim's Art at the Annual Postcard Show

It's time for the annual Postcard show at The Lab (2948 16th Street in the old Labor Temple building in the Mission). Every year The Lab rings their gallery with bins filled with small artworks by dozens of local artists ranging from $1 - $50, to give people access to inexpensive original art for holiday gifts (or whatever).

This year I've gotten into veggie drawings and watercolors, and will have those plus some other graphics, like the floral collage on the left. I get so busy with other things, that I really appreciate this chance to get some small pieces of my own out there. The show opens the evening of 12/4 and goes through the weekend.

Documentary - 24 Pages

24 Pages is a 15 minute documentary that follows what happens during 24 Hour Comic Day, an international challenge where an artist of any background must complete a 24 page comic, written, drawn and inked, within 24 hours. Filmed October 3 & 4, 2009 in San Francisco at the Comic Outpost and Mission Comics and Art by Gary Buechler (co-owner of Comic Outpost).

Once Upon a Dream at the Cartoon Art Museum

Once Upon a Dream: the Art of Sleeping Beauty - Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco (July 18, 2009 – January 10, 2010).

This excellent exhibition at the Cartoon Art Museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of the release of Disney’s visual masterpiece Sleeping Beauty. On display are concept paintings, model sheets, cels, production drawings, color keys, photos and other ephemera that tell the story of the making of Sleeping Beauty from design concept through the finished film. Sleeping Beauty was a Disney milestone: a Technorama 70, 6-channel stereophonic vision of the Perrault fairy tale that took over five years and $6 million to make. Stunning as it was visually, the film cost so much to make that it lost money when it was released in 1959, even though its box office take was only beaten by Oscar-winner Ben Hur. The film had a comeback with the 1979 & 1986 reissues, when it finally took its place among the rest of Disney’s classic (and money-making) films.

Unlike many Disney features, the visual style of Sleeping Beauty was driven primarily by one man, supervising color stylist/inspirational sketch artist Eyvind Earle. Earle was a painter and greeting card designer that was hired at Disney in 1951. Earle painted backgrounds and concept paintings for shorts like The Little House and Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom and the features Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. When Walt Disney decided he wanted to do something with a completely unique look, he took a chance on Earle, and gave him unprecedented control over the project.

Earle created a “medieval tapestry” inspired by the paintings of Durer, Van Eyck, Breughel, and 15th century French illuminated manuscripts, especially the Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berri, as well as Persian miniatures and Japanese art. Another influence was the minimalist, streamlined style of 1950’s graphic design. Many of Earle’s concept and background paintings are featured in this exhibit. I was spellbound by the contrast of the stylized sharp angles, rich color palette, and dense detail work. At one point in the exhibit, there is a concept drawing by Mary Blair for the cover of a Sleeping Beauty storybook, and it’s interesting to contrast Blair's whimsical style with Earle's, and imagine how different the film would have looked based on Blair’s designs.

Many of the animators, which included the famous Nine Old Men and Production Designer Ken Anderson, were concerned that the backgrounds were too cold for a romantic comedy and that the detailed backgrounds would swallow the characters. This struggle is mapped out in a series of model sheets and character concept sketches that show the amount of work that went into finding character and costume designs that would stand out against Earle’s grandiose backgrounds. Of particular interest in this section of the exhibition were drawings of Princess Aurora, who was loosely based on Audrey Hepburn. The princess presented special problems as she has only 18 minutes of screen time to establish herself as the sympathetic heroine before she's fated to meet up with that nasty spinning wheel and sleep through the rest of the film. On top of that, she is living in the forest when the character is introduced, and is dressed in a muted wardrobe that echoes the natural surroundings. The drawings show the character's progression from forest maiden to a princess regally attired in blue or rose colored gowns. Also of interest were different versions of the 3 good fairies, a photo sheet of Maleficent’s two-horned “devil” headdress from every conceivable angle (the animators had a really hard time drawing it), and photos of the "live cast" who acted out the characters for the animators, enabling them to achieve more realistic movement in their drawings.

Much of the work featured in this show is drawn from the collection of Ron Dias, a Disney artist/illustrator whose first professional job in the animation industry was as an in-betweener and clean-up animator on Sleeping Beauty. Dias went on to become one of the most highly-regarded and sought-after background artists and color stylists in the business. The exhibition includes a spotlight section with a selection of Dias’ own work, such as background paintings and color concepts from The Secret of Nimh, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Little Mermaid.

Photo: Production cel of the evil witch Malificent (animated by Mack Davis) and a concept drawing of Sleeping Beauty's castle by Eyvind Earle, courtesy of the Cartoon Art Museum.

Beyond High & Low in the IJOCA

My article Beyond High & Low: How Comics & Museums Learned to Co-Exist, has been published in the Fall 2009 edition of the International Journal of Comic Art. Thank you John Lent, for finding my piece on the "paper table" at PCA/ACA New Orleans last year and inviting me.

Beyond High & Low is about art world politics, modernism, and how The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983), MoMA's High & Low (1990) and Masters of Comics (2005) built on and responded to each other, as well as a few lesser known shows and some exhibition strategies. Since I wrote this article, I've done extensive research and interviews about The Comic Art Show. This was the show that brought Art Spiegelman, John Carlin, Brian Walker and Ann Philbin together, and helped launch Sheena Wagstaff's career, as well as being the first show to display comic art and fine art as equal works in New York museum setting. I was beginning this research when I presented at SDCC in July, and will be presenting on the finished paper at PCA/ACA in St. Louis in March.

IJOCA articles are not published on line. If you are interested in a hard copy or subscribing to the IJOCA, their site is here.