(Photos: Salon 94)
Now showing at Salon 94, NYC, is Jayson Musson's Exhibit of Abstract Art, a selection of paintings and sculptures based entirely on Ernie Bushmiller's "take" on modern art and design in his beloved "Nancy" comic strip.
I'm torn about this show. The Bushmiller fan in me really loves the "tingle of recognition" these works bring. Seeing Rollo the rich kid's lamp (above) is undeniably a pop culture thrill.
The critic/art historian in me, however, is less thrilled. The show seems less like appropriation to me and more like fabrication and... well... wholesale theft, to be honest. Is Musson paying tribute to Bushmiller, or is he simply stealing his wallet?
The most obvious case of a "fine" artist appropriating from comics is, of course, Roy Lichtenstein. But Lichtenstein profoundly and vigorously altered, revised and transformed his source material, far beyond mere recontextualization. The only transformation I'm seeing here (besides making pen and ink drawings "real") is the addition of color, which appears more like interior decoration than deliberate artistic theory to me. He made the stuff really pretty! Personally, I'd prefer the paintings to be black and white.
And finally, I can't help but notice that Musson chose the easiest Bushmiller modern art parodies to recreate.
But, my goodness, he made the stuff REALLY pretty. At the end of the argument, that Bushmiller fan in me pushes aside that critic/art historian in me and says Please manufacture this as a 4" die-cast figure:
In the balance, I think the marquee name here should be "Ernie Bushmiller" rather than "Jayson Musson."
Big thanks to Pony Pal J. D. at Yale University (!) for alerting me to this exhibition.
UPDATE: Much appreciated response from Mr. Musson in the comments.
UPDATE:Thinking about this show more, I come to the conclusion that I really do love it. The installation appears to be really, truly beautiful. and the colors aren't actually all that easy; they're well thought-out. It's actually a great color show. I'm still a little iffy on the level of appropriation going on, though.
11 comments:
I agree, this should be called a Bushmiller exhibit. I recognize all 3 of those pieces from the strip, I think.
And that penguin... such a "think" piece...
Hi Sparklepony, Jayson Musson here. I really enjoyed reading this and actually have read through a few posts previous to this show. I enjoyed your writing on Bushmiller as outside of a few essays in collections, there's not much active writers considering Bushmiller's work.
I just wanted to respond to a few things however, firstly the 'appropriation' vs 'fabrication' assertion, every thing in the exhibition is hand made, from the paintings even to the sculptures, this wasn't an assembly line project, it was quite personally labored over. And it's funny, though Lichtenstein is obvious reference for comics-into-fine art, I was more influenced by Mike Kelley's 'Kandors' project as well as his excellent "Garbage drawings" series from the Sad Sack comics, and much later Bertrand Lavier's 'Walt Disney Productions'. Lichtenstein is excellent of course.
In terms of wholesale theft, that is a fairly hefty claim yet one I expected, this work from Nancy is merely set pieces, really a visual detritus from the strip. If any one can be accused of wholesale theft and stealing from Ernie's wallet it would be Warhol, who's 1961 Nancy painting is worth more than I'll ever make as an artist, or the artist Joe Brainard, who created hundreds of works with Nancy herself as the centerpiece.
And prettiness, haha, they are pretty works, huh? In making the paintings I wanted them to have a visual legitimacy that pulled them away from the comic source, I wanted them to have a formal validity, or formal autonomy that freed them from being "just cartoons" which is why they're in color versus black and white. I love Ernie's humor a great deal, but like previous projects of mine, I guess I was concerned with a joke separating from it's instantiating source and becoming or somehow being viewed as art. As an artist that works primarily with humor, we're often the odd folks out in the "art world" so I guess I'm somewhat obsessed with humor in this context.
Sorry to leave such a long comment, there's more info here in this interview I did: http://www.complex.com/art-design/2014/05/jayson-musson-interview
Okay blah blah blah Jayson. Take care. And sorry for any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, I wrote this on my phone.
-Jayson Musson
Jayson:
Thank you so much for weighing in, and I appreciate VERY much that you take my criticism in stride.
I hope you don't think my "pretty" description was meant as a veiled insult (OK, maybe just a little), because the work really is beautiful, and there's nothing wrong with that!
I definitely appreciate the Mike Kelley spirit.
As for Brainard (I have an autographed Nancy thing by him!) and Warhol... talk about transformative!
When looking at your other work, which I appreciate very much, I can't help but see these things as significantly less interesting. But maybe these pieces will inform future work in ways you didn't expect!
Lastly, it did thrill me that a younger artist is looking at Bushmiller! You correctly identified the irony of his take on modern art: he was scornful of it, and yet, at the same time, was himself a committed and talented modernist.
And it should go without saying that any artist who makes me argue with myself is worth thinking about.
Cheers!
Speaking of appropriation: GoComics has a new daily feature entitled "Random Acts of Nancy", an idea clearly stolen from you, Jeff. And executed in the most offensive way possible - from the colorization of a daily panel to the superfluous addition of bendé dots.
Who is "Jeff"?
God, it's awful. It's a combination of Ben-Day and halftone dotes combined in an unholy stew. Ick.
Oops! I meant "Peter". Embarrassing.
I like the penguin, too!
But.... I like the irony of Bushmiller's jabs at "fine" art becoming physically real pieces of fine art themselves. I think that's a cool idea.
But I guess the bigger irony, as people have pointed out, is that Bushmiller's work itself is now considered great modern art, and could just as easily be shrugged off by the uninitiated as over-simple, obvious, kid's stuff, whatever.
Did Bushmiller actually not enjoy modern art or was he just going for the gags?
I think Bushmiller probably thought abstract art was pretty much a scam, but great fodder for gags. I believe he thought of himself as more of a technician than an artist.
FWIW, there was an artist's book a while ago that did something of the same thing with paintings from Carl Barks' duck comics. I have it somewhere, would need to dig it up, I don't remember the name of the artist.
I must say, though, I really don't buy this:
"In making the paintings I wanted them to have a visual legitimacy that pulled them away from the comic source, I wanted them to have a formal validity, or formal autonomy that freed them from being "just cartoons" which is why they're in color versus black and white. I love Ernie's humor a great deal, but like previous projects of mine, I guess I was concerned with a joke separating from it's instantiating source and becoming or somehow being viewed as art."
The implication here is that Bushmiller's comics don't have "visual legitimacy" on their own, that they are "just cartoons," etc. (I realize that Jayson may have been talking only about the images of art IN Bushmiller's cartoons, but the rhetoric sounds much more generalizing. Also, funny enough, parts of it sound almost verbatim taken from Lichtenstein interviews from the '60s). Which, argggh, do I even need to say it...?
Given that the recontextualization here is nowhere near as radical as in Lichtenstein's work, and given Jayson's clear appreciation of Bushmiller (as opposed to the dismissive comments RL often made about the comic artists he copied), I really think the show should have been credited to both, something like "Bushmiller remixed by Busson," or whatever. That would have been much more fair and truer to the work. As it is, it just reinforces the old High/Low (Lichtenstein, Varnedoe, etc.) paradigm, which by now has been so deconstructed that, when an artist resorts to such unwarranted appropriation of credit, the maneuver speaks of the "high" art world's anxiety more than anything else.
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