|
ART SPIEGELMAN (still alive)
We must never forget the black-vested cartoonist, Jew (this is important), with his Shakespearean mane receding on a middle-aged brow, who invested a scraped living of Raw scrawlings with biography, not a single pretty picture in a world of Earth Days and plastified scalpelwork. Hardly forty years after a Swastika rain and in Free America a new whitewash by Degrees, the slop of revisionism pouring loudly into classroom troughs and ears: 'there was no Holocaust, an exaggeration of death camps and body-pits.' Underground Art begs for you to differ, proffers a cat-and-mouse fable, cartoon fabrication that reeks authenticity, ash and Zyklon ink on paper lacquered with cassette- bundled dysfunction. His brush pains oral history, captured between one man’s fingers and forearm, the numerical exposure of his father. The artist breathes out as ugly as the story itself - impatient, lazy, self-concerned. All this he pencils, too, so you do not mistake him for a hero. This is not epic, but a comix book. He adds the x himself, as ashamed as you are of the craft - hopes the new stem will somehow lift his words above the screentone glasses society likes to wear us down with You, of course, are not fooled by switch or explanation - It’s still a comic book. That this comic/x was given Pulitzer status makes you hem and haw; with ennuied condescension, you remark it did not win the Prize proper, but only a "special citation". The message is stronger than both his shame and your bemusement, an ugly picture from an Ugly Period, where you cannot be dulled by distance or mere words and your attempts at imagination; where the wandering eye is not antiseptic reel offering cold documentary, theatrical intermissions as an excuse to let’s all go to the lobby. No, here is Art’s co-mix, a mingling of the self and the world around him, captured in the expressive transfer of eye and ear to hand. The Jew becomes naked before you, a twisted emaciation of the artist gasping both the history and his story, dealing with a father he couldn’t stand but whose tale needed cartoon shoulders, a place to stand on. Sure, there is a minefield of war books; memory banks with bulging endurance accounts. Does this make a tale of two survivors, one of Hitler’s kiss and the other of a father’s branded shadow, any less? When reading this, how can you miss the weight of world worn through; why do you see only cats and mice? 2002 -- (c) Frank "damonk" Cormier |