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The Killers - When You Were Young
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Ouch!
The ICA’s ‘Splat Boom Pow!’ misses the mark
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Andy Warhol has been dead a long time, Roy Lichtenstein less so. A Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a comic book in 1992 (Art Spiegelman’s Maus received a special citation for "Letters"), and that paved the way for even greater crossover extravaganzas like Dave McKean’s celebrated graphic novel Cages. And not long before his death in 2000, macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey enjoyed a retrospective of his life’s work not at the corporate headquarters of one of the magazines where he was a contributor but at the Art Institute of Boston. In short, the time has long been ripe for "Splat Boom Pow!", the current exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, which takes as its subject matter the influence of cartoons on contemporary art.

Originating at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (it travels to Columbus, Ohio, in January), "Splat Boom Pow!" amounts to an academic exploration of the origins of the moment (or moments) when low-culture comics crossed over into high-culture art. The organizing principle of the exhibit — which despite rereading the catalogue essays I’m still confused about — is a three-part investigation that’s supposed to correspond with the three words in the show’s title. "Splat" (subtitled "Squashing the Force Field of Pop Icons") addresses the phenomenon of Pop Art’s borrowing (or stealing, depending on your perspective) comic books’ imagery — the Batmans and the Mickey Mouses that began making their way into the frames of artists like Andy Warhol and Mel Ramos in the 1960s. "Boom" (subtitled "Exploding the Language of Art through Alien Technology") addresses Pop Art’s appropriation of comic-book techniques — flat figures, narrative panels, Benday dots, dialogue boxes. "Pow" ("Slammin’ into Mt. Mythomania and Spewing Alter Egos and New Super Heroes") refers to the full absorption of comic-book imagery and technique in the artistic expression of post-Pop artists. At least, that was the sense I made of sentences like "This self-created iconography, liberated from conventional traditions, could then more sincerely reflect the ethos of a given subculture through the evolution of both alter egos and personal mythologies."

The show’s conceit raises its own questions. Can imagery ever be separated from technique? Are the early appropriators of comic-book imagery, like the amazing, self-taught Henry Darger, with his voluminous "The Story of the Vivian Girls . . . " series (1957–1967, included at the ICA), any less fully realized than Andy Warhol’s "Myths" series from 1981? But what we have in the Boston incarnation of "Splat Boom Pow!" is an attenuated version of the original exhibit. Seven of the show’s 40 artists are not presented at the ICA, and by my count another nine works by those on view were also dropped from the show. Eighty works were on display in Houston; 66 made their way to Boylston Street.

Over the phone last week, the exhibit’s curator, Valerie Cassel, acknowledged the difficulty a Boston audience might have with the representation of "Splat Boom Pow!" here, not because some works didn’t travel so much as because the show’s organizing principle — imagery, technique, reinvention — plays no part in the ICA display. The original groupings are now intermingled. Although that’s no doubt due to the limitations of the ICA’s own peculiar space, the result is still something of, well, a Bust! And it’s a painful bust, because the idea of popular culture’s early print and later animated cartoons as the template for a significant chunk of the painting and sculpture of our time is such a delightful thought.

Frequently, I had a sense neither of looking at comics (there are no "still" comic strips, despite a video compilation of classic animated cartoons) nor precisely of looking at art. Instead, I felt as if I were surrounded by arguments I couldn’t entirely follow but whose themes were clear: markets and politics and money. Had the show’s curators juxtaposed, say, a racist comic or cartoon image from yesteryear beside Kerry James Marshall’s send-up of the same in Another Great Migration, then we’d have been let in on the forces fueling the artist’s austere, geometric imagery. No such pairing takes place anywhere in the exhibit. Another Great Migration could have come across as powerful; instead it seems simply strident. Splat!

Cartoons are about the intersection of simplicity, humor, and exaggeration; art is about making us re-see our lives. The trouble with the Boston "Splat Boom Pow!" is that instead of asking a tough and wonderful question — how do you derive from the uncomplicated, funny, and exaggerated something transformative and transcendent? — it hammers its audience with dull, typically predictable answers. Here’s a flat, undelineated, comic-book style painting of Captain Midnight by Mel Ramos. (Simple!) Here’s Liza Lou’s seven-foot-tall, big-haired Barbie in a pink business suit made out of tens of thousands of tiny, sparkling beads. (Funny!) Here’s Roger Shimomura’s oversized, buck-toothed, bespectacled Asian boy dancing with the white girls and looking the fool. (Exaggerated!)

Given their simplicity and overstatement, it’s common for animated cartoons to slip into offensiveness; violence, sexism, and racism abound in the cheery, animated classics of yesteryear. And yet they stay appealing, I’d argue, for two fundamental features: they move, and they’re over quickly. That can’t be said of Renee Cox’s large color photos of a black wonder woman taking back the universe. Look at her long enough and she becomes Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag. I don’t mean the Arnold from Pumping Iron; I mean the next governor of California: didactic, slow-witted, bulky.

Similarly irritating and static, but no less professorial, is Roger Brown’s painting Sarajevo, the Serbian Way, a temple to political correctness if ever there was one. Stylized faux gray clouds create a background reminiscent of the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz. In the foreground, the windows of an apartment complex frame animated silhouettes of men and women while an orderly smattering of make-believe bodies bleeds decorously onto the street. Maybe it’s the context of the revelations this week at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague as to the acknowledged genocidal intentions of Bosnian Serb leaders during the Bosnian war that makes Brown’s work feel so perfunctory and facile. And though there’s a more genuine and grittier quality to Laylah Ali’s mercilessly repetitive stick figures, I can’t help thinking of her grimacing Gumbys as Agony Lite — anguish that’s been softened into the nearly cute.

The fine work that did get included — three powerful Keith Haring skateboards that look as if they were about to coast up the wall, two riveting paintings by Roy Lichtenstein — are brought down by their proximity to other work. That can’t be said of George Condo’s 6 Figures (2002), which is so powerful, it doesn’t matter what’s beside it. Condo’s portraits are monuments to deformity, tender and ghastly, irresistible and repellent, in which the elephant-eared and the hypocephalic assume attitudes of forced nonchalance.

Still, you can’t escape the deafening acoustical barrage of Dara Birnbaum’s uniquely miserable ripoff of a dumb TV show (she’s edited sequences from Wonder Woman into a short film loop of the heroine busting through walls and fending off missiles), or Takashi Murakami’s more conceptual but even louder large-screen video homage to hallucinogens. Neither can you help wishing that the 10 dynamic Warhol silkscreens — the "Myths" portfolio includes a dangerous Mickey Mouse, a menacing Howdy Doody, and a green, cackling Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch — hadn’t been hung salon-style so they read like wallpaper. Take that, art lover!


Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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