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Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
Between Fifth and Sixth avenues
212-708-9400
New York
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
Comic Abstraction:
Image-Breaking, Image-Making
March 4-June 11, 2007

This exhibition brings together 13 contemporary artists whose works offer a rich account of interplay between abstraction and comic models of representation. From Sunday newspaper "funnies" to Walt Disney cartoon shorts, appropriation of comics by artists has offered a bridge from lowbrow "stuff" that populates visual culture to rarified brands of fine art. In the U.S, and Europe comics are at the nexus of the high-low debate, while in Japan manga and anime are not differentiated from art. While many exhibitions have explored the impact of mass culture on contemporary art, they generally focused on figuration and easily identifiable pop characters and themes.

This exhibition approaches the topic from a different angle. it looks at the way artists — particularly those working in the last 15 years — have used images culled from slapstick, comic strips, film, caricature cartoons, and animation as springboards for abstraction, not to withdraw from reality but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence, and racial stereotyping.

What does it mean to confront political concerns with humor? How are comics a source for tackling difficult issues? From Julie Mehretu's intricately layered paintings of cartoon explosions portraying warfare and Arturo Herrera's psychological collages of children's coloring books, to Ellen Gallagher's seductively minmalist paintings infused with "blackface" signals evoking minstrel shows and Rivane Neuenschwander's overpainted comic strips, The works presented here grapple with such questions. The act of abstracting a comic image entails blurring, erasing, and "unpainting" figuration in ways that raise the stakes attached to recognition. Bridging the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful, this exhibition underscores how popular imagery, so deeply imprinted on our collective conscious, carries an extreme visual potency even when totally abstracted.

— Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.

Rivane Neuenschwander tackles the politics of Walt Disney by dismantling a historic edition of the popular Brazilian comic book Zé Carioca, created in 1941 when the animator visited South America to support American relations with the region during World War II. The main character, Zé Carioca, a soccer–playing green parrot whose name loosely translates as "Joe from Rio," is a stand–in for the Brazilian everyman. Having grown up with cartoons, Neuenschwander recalls that Zé Carioca acted in stories with nationalistic overtones. "His character was based on a stereotypical cliché of the Brazilian," she says, "or more precisely, the Carioca (someone born in Rio de Janeiro): street–smart, lazy, a lover of soccer and samba, a flirt and a swindler. The cliché of the cliché, he ended up helping to crystallize the national image of the malandro (rascal)." She confronts the implicit political and racial undertones by overpainting the figures in bright monochrome colors and whiting out the text. By turning each page into an abstraction the artist offers viewers a clean slate to imagine their own stories and dialogues.

Milk and Cream belong to Takashi Murakami's Splash series of paintings. While the four-panel formate and graceful arabesque of lines recall traditional Japanese folding screens, the abstract arce of liquid stretching across the gendered pink and blue backgrounds allude to the fertile fluids discharged by hypersexualized adolescents, embodied by the artist's life-size sculptures of his own cartoon characters, Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998). These canvases are reminiscent of anime and manga, in which sex is inferred rather than represented in graphic detail in order to evade censorship. Melding the aesthetic vocabularies of traditional and contemporary Japanese culture, Murakami suggests that Japan's postwar dependency on the United States finds its most procreative expression in the erotic and infantile culture of comics.

Drawing from her experiences of living in North American and Africa, Julie Mehretu makes a new form of history paainting by exploring global migration, expanding metropolises, warfare, and political riots. In this work she overlaps the floor plans of international airports to form a palimpsest of geographic shapes and dynamic lines peopled with what she calls "private urban fighters … The characters and my mark-making are a part of an abstract language that I have been developing throughout the evolution of my work," Mehretu says. "In the past, these came from different sources, like comic books, graffiti, video game graphics, and motorcyle or car graphics." These characters act like superheroes who fight against malevolent forces, escape cartoon explosions, and perform miraculous deeds.

Gary Simmons expends as much energy erasing his drawings as he does constructing them. After meticulously drafting his picturesw he attacks the sketch with his hands clad in thin golf gloves, which allow him to feel the surface and vary the amount of pressure needed to wipe out a drawing without completely destroying it. This wall drawing depicts a cloudburs that carries disquieting associations with war imagery while also recreating the classic cartoon scenario in which two fighting figures clash and then disappear into an explosion. The blast "is a comedic trope for violence," says Simmons. "Cartoons are the first and earliest form of getting pleasure fron a violent act."

Polly Apfelbaum's large, circular, floor-hugging work, inspired by the popular animated cartoon The Powerpuff Girls, is part of a group Apfelbaum calls "fallen paintings" in reference to their irreverent position on the ground. Works in the Powerpuff series — like the cartoons on which they are based — are highly controlled and painstakingly put together while still articulatng the delirious thrill of topsy-turvydom. This piece is an abstract portrait of Blossom, the invincible red-haired and pink-eyed leader of the Powerpuff trio, whose mission is to save the world from evil before bedtime. Apfelbaum espouses superhero comic characters as legitimate catalysts for changte. Discussing the rise of girl power, the artist notes, "I liked the idea of a strong somewhat promiscuous female role model, the slightly out-of-control quality of these cartoon characters."

"A good image is always a social moment," says Phillipe Parreno, whose works are less images to be interpreted than interpretations of social acts.For this installation Parreno devised a cluster of helium-filled ballons made in the shape of comic book speech bubbles. Playfully floating in the air, they nod to Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds (1966), Mylar balloons in the form of oversized pillows. Parreno's rendition also carries a political undertone. The work was originally conceived for the Confédération Générale du Travail (French Union Association) to serve as a tool for organizd protest during a union strike. It allowed individuals to "mark in their own demand," the artist exploained, "while still participating in the same image.

Arturo Herrera extracted the calligraphic swirls and curving shapes of his mural from the images in a Snow White coloring book based on Walt Disney's 1937 animated film. "Animation and cartoons are part of our global contemporary culture," the artist explains. "They are branded on our minds and can't be obliterated. What intrigues me is that we all have a personal relation to a certain character or comic strip. Just a snippet of a specific image will rapidly pile up pleasure, identity, stories, and who knows that into a disorderly mix of associations." The result — a humorous, distorted scene of skewed body parts and sexual intimation — challenges the innocent view of childhood presented in American cartoons. Herrera all but obscures the figures to create an abstracted universe of forms that invokes unsettling collisions between latent juvenile fantasies and displaced adult desires.

Juan Muñoz's sound installation taps into the disquieting world of childhood to exude a sense of menace and humor. Recalling the cartoon series Tom and Jerry, the work consists of a single light shining from a mouse-hole cut into the baseboard of an empty room. A soundtrack of cartoonlike noises accompanies this shadowy environment. The gags of the cat (Tom) and mouse (Jerry) unfold in a perpetual game of chase. In Muñoz's interpretation the protagonists remain visually absent and the sound elements gain absolute importance. As the music builds to a climas the audience anticipates Jerry's impending capture, but no conclusion ever occures. Waiting for Jerry also refers to Samuel Beckett's conception of theater as a drama of discomfiting situations that involve missing players and comically absurd engagements with the audience.

Inka Essenhigh sees her canvases, which are often peopled by stylized superheroes, as arenas for action. In this painting she turns the cheerleader, a symbol of American optimism and sports enthusiasm, into a headless, mechanical-looking body frefalling into a cerulean sky. The artist explains, " The cheerleaders must be divine if they come from the heavens, but they drop like fat turkeys while trying to maintain their composure. The cheerleader on the right tugs at her skirt to make sure that too much of her underwear doesn't show." In its overall effect this painting re-creates the Rococo buoyancy of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's 18-th century ceiling frescoes. Essenhigh plays with spatial perspective and foreshortening in ways that are also similar to cartoonists' techniques. Like Plastic Man, Mr. Fantastic, and other rubbery characters, her malleable figures mold their bodies into any conceivable shape. Using high-gloss insustrial enamels Essenhigh flattens the picture plane, seeking to emulate the shallow, artificial space of Japanese comic books and films, which provide an escape fromthe experience of everyday life.

To Michel Majerus art was a compendium of styles that could be digitally sampled, mixed, spliced, and sequenced into compositions through the aid of layering tools like Photoship. Although he painted his canvases by hand, the electronic genesis of his rapidly executied pictures produced a cool, precise, almost mechanized feel. In this work the cluster of red eggs evokes artist Martin Kippenberger's personal mythology of the world as giant egg and the artist as eggman. The phrase "catch 'em all" brings to mind the Japanese cartoon Pokémon — originally created as a game for Nintendo Game Boy — whose advertising slogan is "Gotta catch 'em all" and whose characters are born out of eggs.

Sue Williams permeates her paintings with sexual motifs rendered in strokes of vivid color coupled with fluid cartoonish energy. In this canvas, images of big toes emerge frm a web of floppy blue and oranges shapes. Tethered to Surrealism's rich network of visual allusions — chiefly to foot fetishism and an obsession with toe-licking — the artist uses displaced sexual motifs, such as spiky heels, pointy shoes, big toes, and pudendalike feet. She identifies the hinged feet seen in Don Martin"s Mad Magazine cartoons as a source of inspiration. "People don't often talk about the fact that my work is funny, "Williams comments, "but that's definitely one of my criteria. I'm really happy if the paint comes out well and it's really a goofy image, like a new dumb take on toes."

Emphasizing the social value of art, Franz West says, "It doesn't matter what the art looks like but how it's used." He encourages viewers to handle and play with his whimisical, portable sculptures, called Adaptives. In this interactive work four Adaptives are displayed outside a cabin with a how-to video. The abstract, oddly misshapen forms may be taken inside the structure, where the viewer can gesture with them in front of a mirror. These objects invite postures and poses that are at once liberating and reminders of social repression. The genesis of the Adaptives is linked to West's brother Otto Kobalek's lexicon of "gesticologies," the thatrical posturing and aberrant grimaces he made when he talked . By disrupting the natural stance of the body. the Adaptives turn even the most adroit participants into Buster Keaton-type performers and often lead to comic scenarios.

Miniscule marks of racist caricature — such as blubber lips and popping eyeballs — pervade the sheets of lined penmanship paper that cover Ellen Gallagher's canvases. The shorthand signs look abstract from a distance, but on closer scrutiny the stock derogatory emblems of black minstrelsy become apparent. The title Oh! Susanna refers to Stephen Foster's 1848 American folk song of the same name, which originated from a slave lament about familes torn apart. The song's racial element was erased when it became popular in the West, associated with the California Gold Rush. The artist explains, "A very specific loss became universal once reace was removed." Gallagher's work disrupst the idea that race and identity are predetermined or fully fixed. Through repetitions and inversions she reintroduces taboo aspect of history to question whether core assumptions have changed.

Ellen Gallagher, American, born 1965, Oh! Susanna. 1993, Oil, pencil, and paper on canvas, 60 x 36", Collection of Michael and Joan Salke, Naples, Florida.

 

Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazilian, born 1967), Zé Carioca no. 4, A Volta de Zé Carioca, detail,1960, Edição Histórica, Ed. Abril, 2004, Synthetic polymer paint and ink on printed paper, six of 13 sheets, Each sheet: 7-1/2 x 5 1/4", Image: 6-1/4 x 4", Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2007 Rivane Neuenschwander.