Lost in the land of my bored youth, luckily the museums are good.
The Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth has a realtively small (but really good) Ben Jones exhibit.
Michelle thought it was ok, but she gets annoyed with the psychedelia of the Paperrad aesthetic. To me, that fits perfectly with B.J.'s exploration of the machine language of eighties popular culture (especially kid culture). There's this undercurrent of creepiness that seems as much influenced by the simplicity of video games' garish Boolean architecture as it does from the tetrahydrocannabinol oozing out of the BeeJ's hair follicles. It's pretty typical stuff for Ben Jones, but it feels good to stand in the same space with his scalable creations. The "video paintings" were the best part. They were Paperrad cartoons unmoored from their temporal housings, infinite, sublime and stupid.
And the neon ladder attached to the wall nicely echoed (probably unintentionally) Martin Puryear's lame, presumably site-specific "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" that's (unfortunately) part of the museum's permanent collection.
Lots of other good stuff, though - tons of Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, a Rauschenberg (which I'm bummed I didn't get a shot of because it had an awesome silkscreen collage of comics pages), a beautiful early Pollock, Warhol guns, some Guston's.
Still unbelievable that this dood who sold goofy, shitty-as-hell minicomics through usscatastrophe sits so comfortably alongside Donald Judd. It was surreal seeing Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales and the PR DVD in the museum gift shop amidst the kitschy "art" gifts and fancy books on museum architecture.
Life vs. Art Dept: My four-year-old nephew, Andrew, who subsists on a steady diet of Dora and the Backyardigans kept us entertained by continuously spouting stream-of-consciousness performances like his claim, after donning googly eyes and birthday headgear , that he was "Monkey Hat and the Juggly-Jug."
(sorry for the crummy cell-phone photos - photography was strictly prohibited)
34 comments:
nice
ben jones asked about comics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlzG7lR2Mck
(via jesse mcmanus)
Sounds like Ben Jones doesn't have much interest in creating comics anymore. Thoughts?
Still mulling that one over myself, Ian...
I think he's kinda at an interesting point in his career. He's been a key figure in alternative comics for the last 10 years, one of the first wave of art comic cartoonists as well. I'm interested to see what happens with all the Fort Thunder/early Kramers guys as the enter the "mature" phase of their career.
It happens to all influential artists. They hit a point where they are no longer leading the way in terms of influencing the young artists, but also hit a point where they have developed enough of an audience to cement a legacy.
It's a shame that comics are still viewed as a cultural/economic ghetto. Before cartoonists would "escape" into animation or hollywood, now guys like Jones can escape into contemporary art. I realize he's been invloved in that scene all along though, so it doesn't totally match up with the narrative I'm painting.
It seems like Jones will either reach the elusive heights of art superstardom, or come back to comics and be adored by multiple generations like Gary Panter. The good thing about the ghetto is that you;re always welcome back home.
Haha, as the Box Elders said, "there's plenty of room at the bottom".
I don't , personally, think Ben Jones was ever really a cartoonist. He made "comics," but it's kinda like the perfect form for his content, McLuhan style. I remember Jason Miles telling me once that Jim Woodring told him that in Woodring's comics the medium is not the message. Jim's using the form because he likes comics, not because it fits conceptually. I feel like with BJ and all the Paperradders it's the exact opposite. There's maybe some early stuff like Horace or other random things (Treehouse of Horror) that aren't this way, but most everything else is an application of the scalability of his vision. I'm sure he likes comics, but he's always been, to me, an "artist," not a "cartoonist."
the coasts collapse on comets comets
east coast gets a lot of love, historically
JO is a westoid, remembering an art show from the south, featuring an eastoid
basically my mind is blown
your backyard looks like a david hockney
jk
"...in Woodring's comics the medium is not the message. Jim's using the form because he likes comics, not because it fits conceptually."
in the TCJ special with the woodring interview, there's that great essay on cartoonists he wrote. woodring has serious cartoonist pride. but maybe less comic-book pride?
he doesn't reference comics history as much as los bros, but they both seem to care less about fancy formats than tom devlin.
i guess im parsing the meaning of 'medium.' in what context it extends past the margins, into the thickness of the paper edge.
i also remember reading that devlin got frustrated with BJ calling things 'cartoons' instead of 'comics'. cartoons was garfield, not greg cook. but does it matter.....hufffff....
I briefly read someone say he wasnt a cartoonist and I get that too.
I think more than anything Ben Jones gave up on some of his more out there ideas and is really beginning to make work that is less concerned with itself and more satisfying for him to make. I mean I remember a tale that he used to do installation stuff in college and then started doing these comics...and I donno, looking at his stuff now I feel like he's really let go of some of the more inane concerns young artists have and is just enjoying himself.
also when I say "his style" I also mean that he is more comfortable with the conceptual implications of his style rather than the conceptual implications of other things he's done.
and the reason I explain that above is because the post i'm commenting on by JO said more or less to the effect " To me, that fits perfectly with B.J.'s exploration of the machine language of eighties popular culture (especially kid culture). There's this undercurrent of creepiness that seems as much influenced by the simplicity of video games' garish Boolean architecture as it does from the tetrahydrocannabinol oozing out of the BeeJ's hair follicles"
but to me I dont think his exploration is all that conscious...to say it that way kind of suggests that he is deliberate in "saying something about the 80's" and I think moreso he is a visual artists whose color palette and mark making and visual lexicon is derived from the 80's and experiencing his life in that culture. It just so happens to make a comment about that era.
I mean nowadays young 20 something hipsters have a tendency to mine/fetishize the 80's but what makes BJ's stuff 'honest' to me is that it came from experience and not some conscious effort to use an era's color/design/etc.
when people talk about ben jones (and when ben jones talks about himself) they distinguish him from other, lesser artists, who are more or less hipsters - 'hipster' being a derogatory catch-all for young, trendy creatives.
why? why assume artist x is being ironic and ben jones is not? why is irony somehow equated with immorality or shallowness? it's hipsters calling each other hipsters. the actual people who make drippy neon triangles are probably nice, honest, sincere (and ironic) people.
i mean, people don't even make that stuff anymore, right? at least it's not on my radar. everyone has gotten older, has moved on.
anon - yeah, I think you're right that BJ isn't consciously referencing the eighties. He's just tapped into this weird undercurrent of contemporary (from the 70s on, maybe) pop culture that I grew up with in the 80s and early 90s. dopey logic, cartoonified behaviors, "the image," video games, fruit roll-up commercials...
and yeah, he can stop appropriating Garfield or Mario and just wallow in style. Makes sense, actually, for him to be 30 ft. from Donald Judd.
Blaise - agreed - "hipster" is a pretty empty, shallow pejorative.
"it's hipsters calling each other hipsters."
re-Art Comics post
blaise-
i wasnt actually suggesting they were being ironic actually, i was suggesting that jones' work seems so strong because it comes from within and it comes from his identity where a lot of younger artists use his visual styling without the strong experience bj had making it himself.
you can kind of tell when someone is lying when they're talking to you and you can tell when someone's art is lying when you see it.
anon, is it because bj himself is from the 80s and younger artists are not? young artists now are primarily referencing the 90s and beyond (the time period they grew up in). but i understand how the 80s aesthetic holds interest for those who haven't grown up in it, and it can still be just as valuable - it can still be interfaced with sincerely.
when 70's culture was resurging i found it a way to interface with my parents' reality. it was silly because i had no 'real' ties with this culture, but it still felt emotional, and still informs a lot of my tastes and nostalgia. it was also a way of relating to other entry level alts who were referencing this thing.
a lot of this 90s culture that is being referenced now is foreign to me, but i still really enjoy seeing it, and responding to it. i don't really care for the 'reality' of it so much, even though (or maybe because?) i participated in that reality.
'you can kind of tell when someone is lying when they're talking to you and you can tell when someone's art is lying when you see it.'
maybe, but 'every lie creates a parallel world: the world in which it is true' -momus
lies are another way of interacting with reality.
anyway, yes, bad art exists, but why focus on bad art that references the 80s?
ah, blaise, the reason why i guess i picked the eighties is because 'hipsters' as a subculture have a tendency to pick up on it. also it seems like a more relevant topic/them given that yes, BJ is actually from the 80's.
also i would argue that it's also a little disingenuous that younger artists also tend towards the modes of exploration of their heroes because they dont know any better too. Like BJ and Gary Panter explore the culture that they were apart of because it was some genuine experience that they had as people, but now it seems like younger artists feel a need for a modus operandi so they start yanking from their own past.
I donno, and there are good examples of that type of work, but I think the whole faux mining of culture has diminishing returns and id rather see something else coming from young artists.
and I do think that sometimes when a talented artist is still young and "lying" their are exciting results but I think there is a world of difference between the lie and the honesty.
and when I say "something else" I dont mean some kind of arbitrary movement away from certain ideas, I just mean Id rather see people less concerned with themselves and more concerned with what they actually want to do at the end of the day. So much of the conceptual weight of an artist is, even like CF said, just giving up on trying to make "work like this" and just making the shit you know is deep in there some where.
yeah ... you're talking about art as a spiritual path, which is cool ...
i don't know
people can lose faith like people can fall out of love - it's not something you can blame someone for
OAnon - I "know" what you're talking about, but could you give some examples of work that engages superficially with 80s culture? I'm not sure that I can talk broadly about a group of artists. I feel better with specific examples. Paperrad are amazing artists and the Ft. Thunder guys & CF are, too, but there are lots of people who grew up in the 80s and are simply nostalgic for Star Wars or something equally lame. I enjoy PR because I feel like they found a way to go past the usual critique of pop culture and, by embracing it, use it as a jumping off point for transcendence, in a way. It's so specific, what they're doing, and it's not that they're referencing the 80s more truthfully or authentically.
blaise, I dont think it has to do with spirituality. I think the creative process has a spiritual side but in my mind what I'm thinking about is basically just people indulging themselves in the 'dumb' things they think they shouldnt make.
for instance, the dirty projectors' david longstreth made some okay awkward folk rock and focused on high concept stuff...but the second he got female R&B singers and started writing pop songs, every element of genius that people saw in him started to shine. i guess you could argue it's because he started writing more 'digestable' tunes but I dont know.
JO- it's interesting because I have a hard time immediately thinking of the people we both know exist. some people I know I could find but dont want to dig up because the degree of separation between this blog and them is kind of minimal and it would be rude and stepping on toes.
but I can think of a multitude of examples not in the visual arts but attached to 'hipster culture'. for example, the band Wavves is a 22 year old kid whose album covers look like this:
http://gormsey.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/wavves-wavvves-big.jpg
http://superhumanoids.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/l_50e3e04cb1864d89b518ec4fe5ec1444.jpg
and his most recent one is almost a deliberate BJ ripoff
http://strangeglue.com/show_image/1275048725/472.jpeg
I mean to me it's just kind of like where does a 22 year old's attachment to this random time period come from short from the fact it's so in vogue nowadays? I remember seeing a list of his favorite albums and it was stuff like The Strokes and some rap. How does that harken do this 80's pastel aesthetic at all?
i wish this BJ, PR talk was less about 'cultural mining' and more about experiential aspects. like how slow-paced, sweet and junky his work used to feel and how radiant, thick and juicy it feels now. and how fucking funny he constantly is.
his slow-pacing, in particular, is something that doesn't get brought up a lot. the 'deadpan' aspect of PR and CF.
if pulling the tape off a ladder he painted with acrylaguache is the 'climax' of his process, that is awesome. that sounds like fun.
most of us dont get a good chance to see his new work in person, making any hullabaloo about it seem distant (adding insult to the injury caused by lack of new solo BJ comics). Jason, it was cool to hear you praise the video painting and call it stupid also.
yes, it appears we've veered off into the negative zone. less hate more love. pirate bung speaks the truth.
I like how raw early BJ and CF stuff was. Their new stuff, for better or worse, is pretty damn slick by comparison.
"Ooo baby I like it Raaaw"
can we talk about richard serra now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCdRAzDc2f0&feature=channel
a beautiful man...
when i sleep at night, for the past couple weeks, i feel the energy of the bed pushing against me
past couple weeks i've thought about putting 'gravity' as my religion on facebook, but it sounds too romantic/retarded
richard serra speaks the truth
Oh, yeah - the video paintings were really juicy & thick. There were all these shifting, bright colors with an occasional silly-looking cartoon figure in the lotus position or a pentagram or something. Really funny, but also so pretty.
The raw, early stuff was so much better at being funny, though. There was one zine with really shitty drawings where some character was spray-painting inside a dog. Before that, I didn't really get Ben Jones, but that made me laugh out loud.
It was awesome standing next to that Serra sculpture.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030126131146/usscatastrophe.com/store/g.n.1.jpg
too bad when links get cut off
cause FUC YAH's link was hi-larious
http://web.archive.org/
web/20030126131146/
usscatastrophe.com/store/
g.n.1.jpg
old skewl BJ
adjust your browser, man
you just needed to 'stretch that out'
we have one of those Richard Serra's outside the museum in Pittsburgh. By the bus stop.
We call it "The Urinal".
Damn you, blue-collar PA philistines!
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