edited by Melissa Chiu
Charta / Asia Society ($70)

by Carmen Tomfohrde

Zhang Huan's performances and sculptures are not easily forgotten. Raw meat, blood, flies, nudity, animal hides, and ashes have made appearances in his brutally confrontational and cathartic presentations. His vengeance is potent, however; never underestimate the power of humiliation.

An example of Zhang’s vengeance is manifest in one of his earliest works. The artist slathered his naked body in a foul-smelling mixture of fish oil and honey and sat motionless for one hour inside a rancid public toilet in Beijing. Holding his face in a resilient, expressionless mask, he silently subjected himself to the sweltering heat and asphyxiating ammonia fumes while flies swarmed and coated him. Finally, he rose, proceeded to a nearby fish pond (a garbage dumping site), and waded in until water covered his head and the few remaining flies straggled drowning at the surface. In this performance, he endured a masochistic amplification of an existing corporeal discomfort to exorcise a shared cultural pain.

Poverty and death surrounded Zhang in his early years. His grandmother and other relatives raised him in Henan Province, China, shortly after the Cultural Revolution. Zhang’s current situation could not be more different. His career has now exploded, and his exhibition history includes numerous shows worldwide. Zhang moved to New York City after his 1998 inclusion in a show at the Asia Society and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. In 2005 he returned to China, where he now employs more than 100 workers at his massive studio in Shanghai. The book Zhang Huan: Altered States honors his 2007 solo exhibition at the Asia Society.

His transition from poverty to art star was not easy. Pilgrimage—Wind and Water in New York (1998) addressed the artist’s difficulty integrating into the United States. For ten minutes, the naked artist lay face down on blocks of ice inset into a traditional Chinese wooden sofa, to which several domestic dogs were ominously leashed. The law of the conservation of energy states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but can be converted from one form to another. Zhang hoped that his exertion of energy could melt the ice (metaphorically, his pain of separation) and bring him closer to his ideal China, symbolized by the wooden bench. Instead, the ice won, dangerously lowering his body temperature.

In My America (Hard to Acclimatize) (1999) at the Seattle Art Museum, three tiers of naked performers surrounded the artist, imitating the structural format of a 12th-century Jain relief sculpture at the same museum. Zhang instructed the actors to perform twelve ritual and devotional gestures, including practicing tai chi, sitting in a lotus position and praying, imitating animals, and finally, pelting the seated artist with torn loaves of bread. The performers then descended from the structure to mingle and charitably exchange pieces of bread. In Altered States, Zhang described the experience that triggered this artwork: he was hungry in Madison Square Garden, New York City, and looking for food for his pregnant wife when a stranger offered him bread. "My feeling was complex," Zhang explained. "I could not speak. I felt emotional and wanted to cry. I accepted the bread and walked away. It made me think of my life in China. In China no matter how hungry I was, I was an artist. Nobody would think of me as a beggar. . . because of difficulties in culture and language, I could not adapt to life in America. I was like an idiot. This is my America."

Unlike the philanthropy Zhang received from an American stranger, in China, personal needs and favors are commonly solved through “guanxi,” the loyalty of support in business and social relations. In My America, Zhang pairs the humiliation and insult of his experience of American generosity with a hodgepodge of spiritual gestures that seem primitive and ridiculous in their random combination. Zhang exposes the frailties of ideologies, cultures, worldviews, and religions, but at the same time he accepts their “bread”; he calls for a revitalization of hope and allegiance, asking witnesses to connect again to the heroic and spiritual in art and life no matter how fragile the shards that remain.

Zhang recently began sculpting enormous reliquaries that oscillate between hope and despair, battling the spiritual betrayal and emotional scar tissue inflicted by the Cultural Revolution. Zhang visited Tibet in 2005 and collected fragments of Buddha sculptures that were smashed apart during the Cultural Revolution, then fabricated the dismembered fingers and legs on a monolithic scale and used the resulting hollow forms as receptacles for animal cages and scrolls. "By making them larger,” Zhang says in this catalog, “it somehow takes away the pain."

A thread of spiritual transcendence and an essential fiber of shared cultural relevance redeem Zhang’s masochism, but his obsessions with pain can be disturbing, and his conceptual aims may not be apparent at first encounter. The format of a book palliates the intense physicality of his provocative spectacles by enabling viewers to slow down and comprehend his rancor and vehemence more gently, mediated by the intimacy of print and writing. To that end, the book is effective, but Zhang’s urgency and potency fade in descriptions of some later works, which are less cathartic and more allegorical and cross-cultural, though still harrowing in their cruel theatricality. The written content of the catalog crescendos in the last and longest essay: Zhang Huan’s own plainspoken, straightforward, and honest explanations that link his works to his plaintive needs for creating them.

Some troubling works are not included. For example, his Giant 1 and Giant 2, intended for the Shanghai Art Museum, were censored by the Shanghai Cultural Bureau and ended up in the collection of French businessman François Pinault, while Giant 3 was recently shown at Pace Wildenstein, a very prominent and influential New York gallery that invited Zhang to its lineup in 2007. These artworks are imposing figurative sculptures constructed of hundreds of animal hides stapled together, hooves and hair included. One giant is pregnant, and a smaller figure (perhaps representing the artist) climbs another giant, desperately seeking love and asylum from a rotting and horrendous environment. Zhang is no stranger to censorship: in 1993, the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts in China did not appreciate Angel, his performance about abortion and China’s one-child policy, which involved fake blood and dismembered dolls. The celebratory disposition of a coffee table book fails to engage the non-celebratory ramifications of his work in China and the effects it may have outside the circle of his supporters.

Sometimes shock is needed to break society’s complacency. Zhang’s extreme physical risks reward the challenge of unraveling their contextual importance, and this book adds pathos and human interest to that shock while conceptually substantiating Zhang’s displays. By persuading viewers to slow down and muster the courage required to understand his motivations, the book has the potential to expand that circle of supporters by revealing the poetry, conceptual depth, and moral and ethical challenges that mobilize his intrepid cultural aims.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Brandon Stosuy, Domenika Szope, Stephan Urbaschek, Matthew Barney
Sammlung Goetz ($50)

by Sean Smuda

The primacy of the body as object—its fluctuations, trainability, aberrations, procreation, and death—is in a nutshell the Matthew Barney glass bead game. Self described as a sculptor, his five-filmCremaster Cycle (with its attendant sculptures, photographs, and drawings) casts him as many characters: killer Gary Gilmore, Houdini, Masonic apprentice, and goat-man. Their purposes and actions are in large part informed by the cremaster muscle, which, responding to outside stimuli, causes the descent or ascent of the testes, potentially determining gender. Barney’s cool semi-autobiographical exposition of the body’s extremes, potentials, and ultimate transformation through symbolic, wordless narratives is process as metaphor. Its revelation of his and our own cyclical natures is a radical rite of passage into an understanding of culture as biology and visa versa.

Located outside of Munich, the Goetz Collection is an internationally renowned private art museum designed by architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, open by appointment only. The Collection has given Barney full reign in designing both his solo show there and its catalog, which is itself an organic objet d’art: covered in cocoon-like fabric, it perhaps alludes to Cremaster 3’s Masonic apprentice’s apron, placing the reader at the start of a journey to match Barney’s own transformations. Beyond the layout of images, the book is a field guide to his work, with synopses, incisive essays, interviews, and glossary.

In the introduction, German collector Ingvild Goetz writes that “Barney is a man of many contradictory qualities. . . us(ing) material nobody has used in an art context before.” Contradictions and conflict rendered as meta-narratives of the cremaster muscle are the central process and metaphor employed by Barney in his facture. Cremaster 1 is a Busby Berkeley-style dance number about the pure potentiality and quizzical imbalances in determining gender. Its related, hardened-Vaseline sculpture is a high-heeled shoe. And in Cremaster 3 the embracing and then killing, in self–defense, of his female nature tragically finishes its installment. However, as critic Stephan Urbaschek writes in the first essay, “it is not the conclusion of this. . . that is of foremost interest to the artist. . . Rather, it is the path travelled between. . . and all the possible detours that can occur along the way.”

No floor map is included, but careful descriptions and full-page spreads take us from the third story to the basement in a chronological descent through the work. From the OTTOshaft¹ videos on top, to theCremaster Cycle, to Drawing Restraint 9, there are many detours. Urbashek states that Barney “has personally developed the exhibition concept. . . to liberate the individual as the sole bearer of emotions and to extend this function to architecture as well.” What emotions might these be that are best born by oneself other than those of perverse dreams, gender musings, and love? Perhaps, as he quotes critic Nancy Spector, those associated with “competition, exhibitionism and idolization. . . masculine identity.” Indeed, unifying our masculine descent through the museum and book are the photographs of the wrestling Drawing Restraint 7 satyrs.

In their homoerotic match, the satyrs ironically look like an individual doubled, then post-coitally freed from himself. In an interview with Barney, Brandon Stosuy remarks on his “interest in eroding the difference between individuals, and how that relates to a team,” to which Barney replies “I want them to be compelled. . . in an ambivalent way. . . where one character become(s) an aspect of another. . . that the environment can become the central, emotional character.”

This brings us to the core of the exhibition and the book, where all five Cremaster films play simultaneously. On high, angled flat screens that jut from a central pole in pentagram formation, the feature-length films play in a kind of punishment for the spectator with no seat in sight. In a sense they represent a perverse sports bar in Barney’s Olympus; the non-player’s hubris must here atone for glimpsing Barney’s locomotions of ambiguities and transgressions, and without beer!

This environment of drones, rhythms, and its unviewable totality of imagery is set to break down the individual’s resistance. Here, as in the films, Barney’s incorporation of entropy and failure is practical, seductive, and even endearing. In the sense that any artist trains his audience to perceive like himself, one emerges from this undifferentiated playing field with new abilities to perceive and recombine the core motif of Barney’s work: muscle response causing gender attitude. The juxtapositions and overlaps here may lead to exhaustion, but also to new insights. This is partially described as “Find the first sound and the last and notice how they engulf one another.”

The final room of the exhibition, BASE 103, showcases the end of our “male trajectory” and the blossoming of its cold hard love. Drawing Restraint 9 was made after the Cremaster Cycle and is the semi-autobiographical story of Barney and experimental pop singer Björk falling in love during a Japanese Tea Ceremony on a whaling ship. In this final act of contradictions and conflict, the primacy of the body is stripped away into a metaphor of pure being. Barney and Björk sculpt one another into whales with bloody flensing knives, all the better to experience the eternal fluctuations between the genders! As they swim off, I can’t help but think of a Deleuzian Ahab mating with Moby, becoming imperceptible and differentiating and intuiting Nature, both inner and outer.

¹OTTOshaft is a pre-Cremaster video series based on legendary Oakland Raider’s quarterback Jim Otto, who trained and played so hard that his knees were replaced with Teflon. In the video, two satyrs wrestle: one is Otto, the other Houdini. They represent the inward and outward conditioning and intent of the mind, spirit, and body. At the end of their contest they flay one another in an act of hubris.
²Becoming Imperceptible is the challenge of no longer acting as a separate and selecting point within the world, but of becoming different with, and through what is perceived. One way to think becoming—other than the perceived image of ‘man’ is through becoming-animal.” from Gilles Deleuzeby Claire Colebrook (Routledge, 2001).

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Danny Wilcox Frazier
Duke University Press ($39.95)

by Callie Clark-Wiren

Danny Wilcox Frazier’s Driftless: Photographs from Iowa is the 2006 winner of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Photography/Honickman First Book Prize. Frazier’s images endeavor to shed light on the people and places that mainstream media neglects to illustrate. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, altering rural America. Taken by an insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs show us these abandoned places and describe the lives of those people who stay behind. His approach is completely different than this spring’s news stories about Iowa’ spring flooding, which presumed that the impacts, although awful, were limited to the present; nowhere on national media were reports of the long lasting effects of the flooding on Iowa’s already unstable rural economy.

The instability of Iowa’s economy was the primary focus of Frazier’s Artist’s Talk at Duke University on 8 November 2007, but he also pondered whether or not Iowa’s rural lifestyle will ever be viable again. At the end of the talk Frazier stated, ”The reality is that farm work is so mechanized now that maybe we just don’t need that many people living in rural areas, and maybe it’s just a pipe dream I need to give up on.”

Frazier has statistics to back his ruminations. According to POYi.org more than 60% of college-educated Iowan’s leave their rural communities. Frazier has explained in various interviews that they are seeking intellectual careers in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, even as far as New York, leaving half of Iowa’s counties with a decreasing, less educated population: 79% of the population in Iowa has a high school diploma or less (quickfacts.census.gov). Meanwhile, other government census statistics list the (legal) Latino immigrant population as having increased 153% between the last two censuses.

Frazier, a photojournalist by trade, states in his Artist’s Talk that his work is not partisan, but his words are clearly left-leaning, as when he cites facts of immigration’s effect upon Iowa rural economics, or includes captions in his book such as “Migrant workers enduring long hours bent over while harvesting watermelon, Conesville, 2003,” to illustrate their roles in the economy. Another photograph, “Bull rider and farmhand Rusty Caudle, North Liberty, 2003,” shows Rusty’s sinewy body exhibiting the extreme physical labor required to maintain a farm, as if making the point that these immigrants are accepting bone-breaking work that few others want to take; yet for those Iowans who remain, it is difficult to survive when immigrants accept work at lower rates. Often enough when workers attempt to organize, employers play on fears of Federal officers swarming in to keep unions out. This is only a small piece of the vicious economic cycle that endangers rural culture in Iowa.

It was a discussion on All Things Considered that inspired Frazier to photograph evidence of another social issue, manifested by the Stutzman family—an Amish family with several children who work up to 14-hour days during harvest. The radio story covered a debate over international child labor laws that would make it illegal for children under the age of eighteen to operate heavy machinery. In numerous interviews, Frazier related his going to the farm and finding a six-year-old who had already been driving a skid-loader for a year. Many rural families rely upon their numerous children in order to provide the labor to survive, yet outsiders may wonder if a child operating such equipment is the equivalent of child-endangerment.

Frazier produced this book’s body of work over a period of four years with a single Leica camera, one lens, and a bag of TriX film, resulting in a few thousand photos, yet he selected only eighty images for the final publication. As loaded as the images are with the political debates of the contemporary rural community, only about 80% of them relate to these debates. The images are high-contrast black-and-white gritty scenes that recall the feel of Sin City (Frazier stated in his Artist Talk that “the color images didn’t have the color of life”), but with a subtle influence from the works of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Frazier has repeatedly disclosed the influence of Frank’s work on his own, making it possibly problematic that Frank was the judge of the Honickman Prize given to Frasier.

That question aside, Frank is considered the pioneer of the snapshot effect, and Frazier’s work is very from-the-hip, as some images are completely out of focus. This distorting effect works for images such as “Harry and Helen Phelps, Sutliff, 2005,” which conveys the disorientation of Helen’s advanced Alzheimer’s, and “Plastic farm scene, Fort dodge, 2003,” which possesses an ethereal fairy-tale feeling, while images like “Cowboy playing pool at a bar, Ottumwa, 2004” and “Outside the farmhouse, Johnson County, 2006” reveal nothing in their blurriness. While Walker Evans’ Farm Security Administration works are clearly reverberated in images such as “Sale Barn Café, Kalona, 2005” and “Harvest on the Miller family farm, Kalona, 2005,” with their depictions of hard working Americans trying to scratch out a living and a life amidst the difficulties of agriculture, Frazier’s photographs are less hopeful for the future when the cynicism of the dehumanizing of farming begins to enter them.

A confluence of these inspirations with the luck of correct focus occurs in the image “Patriotism, Des Moines, 2006,” where, while driving, Frazier’s chance sighting of a veteran with a full-size American flag attached to his wheel chair is caught with a near-lying camera without his even looking through the viewfinder. The image captures the Iowan tradition of military service even in today’s war, yet the darkness of the image and near-scowls on all but one face give a negative tone to that patriotism.

As much as Frazier declares his work to be giving a voice to the rural communities he lives among, he can still be seen as the Iowan who left for the big city. He too left the family trade for an intellectual career, even if still residing in Iowa City. At his Artist’s Talk, he declared, “I just for whatever reason did not feel comfortable in my own skin or the place I was from. I, no different from those who have fled the rural areas in the Midwest, had a feeling of wanting to escape… It’s still wanderlust just to get out and travel.” Frazier’s journalistic work has sent him all over the world, leaving his family in Iowa as he travels.

When comparing his roots to his place in Iowan society today, one cannot help but question if, by only showing the harsh realities, Frazier is exorcising the realities that made him uncomfortable, in that way allowing him to remain. “Plastic farm scene, Fort Dodge, 2003” is the idealized stereotype of Iowa that Frazier is correct in showing to be false. In its place, however, rather than showing positive images of hardworking people, he paints an image of uneducated, aimless youth that have remained, a dying generation before them, and an overworked minority population growing to support them all.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Darby English
The MIT Press ($30)

by Christina Schmid

Free to be you and free to be me—whether you look at children’s books or listen to presidential proclamations of the United States’ national values, American mythology teems with the idea of freedom; on an individual level, that includes the freedom to be who we are and, more importantly, what we want to be. Yet does this seductive myth of freely invented identities withstand closer scrutiny?

In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, investigates the limits of this almost proverbial freedom in the work of five African American artists at the turn of the 21st-century: each of these artists—Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, and William Pope.L—must answer to what English calls “black representational space.” As members of a group perceived to be different from the norm, these artists are called upon to represent their group, as if it were some sort of homogenous monolith, whether they want to or not. But what exactly happens when the group on whose behalf you are expected to speak disagrees with what you have to say?

That, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by these artists, whose representations of African Americans have not always been respected by African American communities. Each artist grapples with the demands of black representational space and its unwritten set of responsibilities and obligations differently, but what they share is the desire to disorient and intervene in the putative stability, knowability, and coherence of this representational space in which they, as African American subjects who make art, inevitably find themselves.

English probes the political, historical, and cultural conditions that have given rise to black representational space; invoking Fanon, Du Bois, Locke, and Booker T. Washington, he takes great pains to situate the genesis of black art in “the shadow of Jim Crow,” in early 20th-century narratives of racial uplift, and in explicit calls for black art and propaganda to function as one. “Black art,” writes English, “is never the obvious or inevitable result of a black artist’s creative labor. It is rather a regime whose sharp redress is sometimes required for meaningful aesthetic and intellectual advancement.”. Black art, then, does not simply result from the creative efforts of someone who happens to be African American; it is a regime of representation, closely related to demands to “act black” or questions of whether someone is indeed ”black enough” that enter into the artistic realm here. (One can draw timely comparisons to the discussion the current Democratic presidential nominee has inspired among African Americans of different generations.)

The politics of negotiating this representational regime become most urgent in two instances of English’s study: first, there is Betye Saar’s 1994 letter campaign against Kara Walker’s “negative images” of African Americans. Saar, whose work unequivocally conforms to the demands of black art, presented Walker’s imagery as a threat to the coherence and dignity of black representational space: in Saar’s opinion, Walker’s sexual, scatological, and frequently violent portrayals of African Americans do not abide by the narrative of racial uplift and the duties of representativeness. English refutes Saar’s claims by situating Walker’s work in the genre of landscape painting and interprets the new kinds of imaginative spaces her tableaux create.

The second controversy English analyzes in detail happened in a much less organized and more insular way: during William Pope.L’s Tompkins Square Crawl in 1991, the artist, in a suit and videotaped by a white man, crawled along the street holding a flower pot with a marigold, when an unnamed resident of the then-troubled neighborhood approached him to express his concern. This initial reaction quickly changed to anger and contempt, though, and the resident demanded to know, “what are you doing showing black people like this?” His outrage lies at the heart of what English terms black art’s regime of representation.

English portrays the nameless resident as someone caught up in the very categories and narratives of upward social mobility and black middle-class unity that Pope.L’s performance seeks to question. In English’s analysis, the resident, who “gropes ever more intently after forms of knowledge that will hold—of race, class allegiance, legitimate art, and the law,” comes to stand in for all those unilluminated, ordinary people who do not understand and are too impatient to wait to be told the meaning of Pope.L’s symbolic acts. The artist tries to defer the resident’s attention—“I’ll explain it to you later” and “when I get finished"—but the resident insists on an explanation right then. The account resonates with a discomfiting edge of condescension toward the resident’s values as a presumably middle-class individual, and one cannot help but wonder if a different portrayal of the stakes involved for each of the participants might have been possible.

The very language in which English presents his observations seems exclusionary: How to See A Work of Art in Total Darkness is not conducive—or intended—for casual reading. The book resulted from a doctoral dissertation and dutifully performs in the argot of academia, with its own narrative of uplift and professional advancement. While English points out that even Pope.L’s critique of the categories of difference we so habitually rely on to make meaning remains complicitly caught up in them—to decenter “does not mean giving up,” English observes—his own participation in yet another version of the narrative of uplift goes unexamined and unmentioned. Perhaps a former dissertation is no place to look for such reflexive self-referentiality, but the centrality of the narrative of uplift to English’s argument suggests otherwise.

How to See a Work in Total Darkness treads cautiously into the minefield of cultural difference and the politics of representation. The artists push the conceptual constraints of black representational space—but ultimately, they expand rather than abandon that space. According to English, they perform careful balancing acts: on the one hand, they resist the representativeness imposed on them and insist on pursuing creative expression and artistic liberty wherever it may take them, from Walker’s Southern Gothic tableaux to Ligon’s paintings of Richard Pryor’s crude jokes to Julien’s exoneration, of sorts, of blaxploitation movies. On the other hand, though, they still permit the “simultaneously obdurate and intimate character of the constraints against which they work.” English investigates these constraints on what is permissible, representable, and even thinkable. But if these artists indeed rebel against the dictate to produce black art, their resistance, in the final analysis, is less an explosion of the space they are caught in than a stretching, broadening, and twisting its boundaries.

Their work, then, functions as the necessary means of redress for the sake of advancement—but whose advancement are we talking about? It seems as if, despite their complex negotiations with the politics of difference, including active resistance and disobedience to the demands placed upon them, in the end English returns their work to the narrative of racial uplift, in the guise of intellectual and aesthetic advancement.

What happens to the ur-American idea (and ideal) of freedom here? Who is indeed and without reservations free to be you and me? English points out that we, whether as viewers of art or participants in the social realm, are accomplices in maintaining the meanings—and constraints—of difference. The policing of the boundaries of difference—English refers to the “boundedness” of race—is by no means limited to an anonymous, desperately invisible source of power, but, as English shows, resides within the contradictory constraints of black representational space itself.

English’s five artists all open up “the multiple meanings of blackness and the plurality of ways of living under the black sign” through their disorienting interventions. As African American artists, these five may have to struggle to shed the racial responsibilities placed upon them. They may not be free to be whoever and whatever they want to be—but they are expanding the possibilities of being and living under the black sign.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Veronique Tanaka
NBM/ComicsLit ($13.95)

by Ken Chen

Now, that surprising epoch, is an exciting time for the comics medium—but not for the reasons you think. While superhero movies sulk their way through multiplexes, many of today’s most thrilling comics are made by young artists who believe comics aren’t necessarily about respectable storytelling, but can present visual fooling around in the most preposterous, goofball tradition. This approach towards comics relies less on autobiography (like the straightforward narratives of, say, Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis) and more on art school spectacle, pop cultural noodling, and, for some, an earnest attempt to recover the technical resources that comic strips possessed before the rise of superhero comics. More influenced by Gary Panter than Dan Clowes, comic books artists who work in this vein—such as Lauren “Goddess of War” Weinstein, Brian “Ninja” Chippendale, and Paperrad—are not really “graphic novelists”; there isn’t really enough of a story for it to be a novel.

It’s in this context that Veronique Tanaka’s Metronome reads most curiously: while unlike anything else done in comics, Metronome is the opposite of the innovative, art-oriented comics I just mentioned. Those art comics imagine the page as a flat, decorative field or an illustrated poster, and are hairy with the artist’s human style, but Metronome consists of mechanical, black-and-white, computer-generated grids that are four columns down and four across.

Tanaka isn’t interested in drawing as expression, but as an abstract visual music. Her work reads like an ’80s Hypercard stack or the choppy clatter of a kinetoscope, with characters often cut-and-pasted from one panel to the next. This is an unusual, avant-garde conception of the panel, whose narratological usefulness has forced comics into being a subtle medium: a page by, say, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, for example, isn’t a static spectacle possessing a clear focal point (like the typical Western canonical painting); it’s a claustrophobic mosaic of boxes that may be individually dull yet cobble together into a more fecund narrative life. Rather than forsake panels entirely in favor of a visual free-for-all, like many American alternative artists under forty, Tanaka wants the panel to dehumanize the page even further.

Take two scenes in Metronome that may be roughly summarized as “Man plays piano while smoking cigarette” and “Man proposes to woman who throws ring at his face.” It’s easy to imagine a less diremptive artist plotting this as one panel and three, respectively, but Tanaka dices the action into twelve and forty panels—she isn’t a storyteller, but a surgeon of time. You can almost hear the pages click as you read them, an artificial four-four trot that isn’t really linked to any internal motion of the story.

So, while this graphic novel ostensibly tells a generic love story about a Japanese couple who slowly break up (with some intriguingly objectified sex along the way), this is not a psychological comic; Metronome is more interested in the world as a collection of objects. The comic begins with a slow pan across the couple’s apartment, in which Tanaka restricts most of the action: the first ten pages have no people, only close-ups of the couple’s accoutrements, such as a watch and a metronome (the opening images, used to set the beat), a piano, a lava lamp, and a tribal mask. These objects never acquire a connotative life. Rather, the characters themselves reduce to icons, as you might expect from a conceptual artist less influenced by comic books than by Robbe-Grillet. There is no individuality to Tanaka’s drawings. If her intention was to create comics without aura, she succeeds masterfully.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá
Dark Horse Books ($17.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

Every story must deal with the problem of how to keep the reader moving forward. In prose, where the line of letters leads off one page and onto the next, it’s relatively easy. But in media that marry words with pictures, there’s an additional challenge, since the reading eye might lose its way in the images. It’s not enough to put something intriguing in the last panel of every second page; a good comic needs to balance the novelty and interest delivered on each visual spread with the expectation of something at least as novel and interesting on the next—not to mention the challenge of bringing the reader back for another issue in a month’s time or another graphic novel in a year’s.

Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite begins with a full-page illustration of a wrestling match between a human and a giant space-squid, setting both the time and the tone of the story, and it barely pauses for breath after that. In its essentials, the narrative resembles any of a number of superhero team books: it follows a group of child superheroes, formed into a team by a wise yet mysterious benefactor, that reforms after years apart, upon the benefactor’s death. But this bare-bones synopsis captures nothing of what makes The Umbrella Academy so dazzling: writer Way has used the somewhat familiar setup as the scaffolding upon which to hang a tale that revels in its own complexity.

Way—better known to many as the lyricist and frontman of the rock band My Chemical Romance—is an admirer of Grant Morrison, the famed writer behind the pop-surrealism of the 1980’s revival of DC’sDoom Patrol, and there’s a certain Morrison-esque density of cool ideas in Apocalypse Suite. Morrison, who writes the introduction for this collection, says it reads “like the work of a veteran master of the form.” Way’s imaginings, although punctuated with darker moments, don’t have underpinnings quite as dark as those that brood beneath some of Morrison’s work. When more serious moments do emerge, particularly late in the volume, they serve as momentary pauses that counterpoint the exuberance of the rest of the comic.

The artwork, by the Brazilian Gabriel Bá (who also illustrated the first storyline of the equally over-the-top comic Casanova) is a terrific match for Way’s writing. Clearly, if you’re publishing a comic that includes a major character whose human head is perched atop a gorilla’s body, a woman who’s part dressmaker’s dummy and part see-through-anatomical model, and a robot/zombie version of tower architect Gustave Eiffel, and you haven’t lined up Gabriel Bá to do the art, something is very wrong. This is not just because of Bá’s ability to render the unusual—which is considerable—but equally due to how he can make every panel, even those concerned with more ordinary characters and occurrences, just as striking.

And, of course, when faced with scenes where the dialogue consists of, for instance, a child hero saying, “It’s a good thing these old levitator belts were lying around,” and his simian associate answering, “Yes, because there’s nothing conspicuous about a ten-year-old boy flying around with his monkey,” Bá does not disappoint. Indeed, with all their levitating chimps, homicidal violinists, and undead French architects, The Umbrella Academy manages to deliver the surreal and the just plain odd with energy, wit, and style. Luckily, Way and Bá have a second story-arc about to get underway that promises more of the same.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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Ara Shirinyan
Futurepoem ($15)

by Katie Fowley

Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country is Great: Afghanistan—Guyana is an exercise in how to say nothing about a place—a testament to the self-defeating potential of descriptive language. Take, for example, these lines about Germany: “The atmosphere in Germany is great / and it’s just like Africa here—” or these lines about Greece:

Greece is great,
the people are great,
the antiquities are great,
the scenery is great,
the ferries are great
the food is great
and yes,
the shopping is great

Shirinyan created these poems using a list of the world’s countries and typing “[country] is great” into Google. He crafts the poems by tweaking, ordering and lineating the results, but preserves idiosyncrasies such as sentence fragments, misspellings, and chatroom shorthand. For countries that landed no Google results—Burkina Faso or Central African Republic—he leaves the page blank.

Typing “[country] is great” into Google brings up predictable results from (mostly American) tourists, but it also brings up results that concern the immense problems a nation faces. Shirinyan exposes this contrast by placing real problems such as hunger, poverty and lack of resources next to the self-absorbed reflections of tourists:

The number of children needing homes
and the level of poverty in Guatemala
is great

Guatemala is great—
not quite as cheap as Thailand,
but laid back.

Some poets use repetition to tease a word and pull out its multiple functions, but Shirinyan uses repetition to deaden meaning. He reveals the bankruptcy of the word “great” and other words, such as “cool,” “friendly,” and “different” that get repeated frequently in vapid accounts of living abroad and encountering other cultures.

Shirinyan keeps a cynical distance from the voices he culls, which range from the blind enthusiast (“CROATIA IS GREAT!!!!!!”) to the tentative bore (“El Salvador is great, but / I think I’m ready to go / back to the states”) to the special interest writer (“‘living’ in Belgium is great, / although the deathmetal scene is/ not that big over here”). He attacks lifeless tourists, self-aggrandizing adventurers, bourgeois patrons of water sports and prostitution, and the banal conversationalists of the blogosphere. What saves the book from being overly scathing is its sense of humor. Yes, the Internet has leveled all things, allowed us to flaunt our lazy attempts at communication, and encouraged the overuse of exclamation points and emoticons, but the results are often hilarious:

BERMUDA IS GREAT
Robbie Williams is so hot.
So is Johnny Depp
and Orlando Bloom.
Disneyland is so much fun.
Having partys with my friends is so cool.

There are also instances of surprising language that emerge from the sea of predictable sludge: “I remember ‘the lion feeling’ years ago,” or “Gibralter is great for main street / and the monkeys,” lines that sound like—dare-I-say-it?—poetry.

This is found language, but the poet’s hand should not be underemphasized. Shirinyan molds these poems just enough, preserving their arbitrariness and non-sequiturs but also arranging them in ways that make them feel rounded and complete with particular attention to finishes: “A swimming pool with / no bodies Is a problem that we can fix.” He also uses repetition and line to create refrains and percussive rhythms:

France is Great
and the rest of the World Stinks

France is Great
and the rest of the World Sucks

Often the lines are short and choppy, reflecting the overly simple and bumbling ideas they express. Some of the poems, restricted as they are to Google search results, are a bit too fragmentary. The strongest ones are the ones that hold together, like this one:

FALKLAND ISLANDS IS GREAT

Falkland Islands is great,

but since it’s progressing so fast,

maybe not yet.

This poem is particularly humorous against the backdrop of overdone enthusiasm found elsewhere in the book. Lack of conviction is the constant, and the most “enthusiastic” parts (marked by caps and exclamation points) sound as empty as the doubts.

One does not finish Your Country is Great having learned anything useful about the nations of the world, but one might come away from it thinking about the relationship of tourists to foreign lands, the exhausted state of travel writing, or the equalizing (and negative?) effect of the Internet on discourse. Shirinyan’s book invokes a response that is a mixture of highbrow scorn and embarrassing self-recognition, for who hasn’t reveled in getting a bargain (“Breakfast was usually $2 a person, / with bacon”), bragged about having an authentic experience (“i should know / i grew up there”), or used, and probably overused, that ever-so-innocuous word “great.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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David Shumate
University of Pittsburgh Press ($14)

by Kristina Marie Darling

In his recent collection of prose poems, The Floating Bridge, David Shumate explores such diverse subjects as translation, amateur Zen masters, and Franz Kafka’s first date. While his book treats a variety of ideas, the works within it continually return to the idea of “another world” just beyond our own, where one’s most basic assumptions about the social order no longer hold true. Filled with finely crafted narratives and wild flights of the imagination, Shumate’s collection offers readers a range of variations on the prose poem while remaining impressively consistent as a book-length project.

The use of extraordinary settings to structure The Floating Bridge is particularly noteworthy. Beginning with a set of poems entitled “Far Villages,” the works in Shumate’s collection travel from “Babylon” to “Paris” and the “Bible Belt,” at the same time conveying the mythology that surrounds each of these locales. Frequently using the prose poem as a vehicle for contemporary allegories and parables, Shumate explores the sense of otherness that arises as a result of place. In “The Next Village,” for example, he writes:

In the next village the bells ring at all hours. In the middle of the
night when everyone is asleep. At midday when the children huddle
over their studies. In the evening when families bow their heads.
They leave the door to the tower unlocked so anyone can pull
those ropes. When loneliness descends. When love overtakes all.
They feel it is good to let others know.

In this poem, the customs of “the next village” are narrated by an outsider who depicts them as being at once strange and disconcertingly systematic. By creating a speaker who merely observes another civilization’s way of life without partaking in it, Shumate communicates many of the modern dilemmas inherent in globalization, the lack of understanding of other cultures being only one example. “The Next Village,” like other poems in The Floating Bridge, speaks to the contemporary while conveying universal themes, a project that remains thought-provoking throughout.

As the book progresses, Shumate’s use of familiar imagery in constructing the fantastic grows impressive. Frequently using this device to suggest that “The Far Village” and “The Orange Flags of Babylon” may reside merely a few footsteps away, Shumate creates a world in which the everyday is rendered nearly unrecognizable. This trend is particularly apparent in a poem entitled “Lucifer,” in which Shumate conflates the bar scene with biblical stories:

He asks the red-haired woman sitting across from
him if she’s ever thought of being in the movies. The other night
she watched him seduce a Polish girl on the Left Bank with the
same ploy and no one’s seen her since. She leans across the table
and gives him an ironic kiss on the forehead. His skin sizzles at
the touch of her lips. The room falls silent. Even the fly buzzing
above the pasta pauses in midair.

Throughout this passage, the author pairs the sacred with the profane, using this juxtaposition to imbue gravely serious subjects with unanticipated humor. In doing so, Shumate’s prose poem reads almost as a contemporized parable in which present-day pasta and movie stars become part of a spiritual riddle. A wonderful match-up of form and content, “Lucifer,” like other poems in The Floating Bridge, suggests something of the extraordinary in the everyday.

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Lola Ridge
Factory School ($14)

by Michael Aiken

In 1907, at age 34, the poet Lola Ridge emigrated from Australia to the U.S. Finding employment in various industrial sweatshop environments, she quickly became involved in both socialist/anarchist/feminist activism and the modernist literary movement, contributing to and editing a number of “little” magazines. The Ghetto and Other Poems, her first book, appeared in 1918 to critical acclaim; as Nancy Berke has noted, her work was admired by major poets including William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, and when she died in 1941 she was eulogized by the New York Times as a “leading contemporary poet,” yet for decades her work has been overlooked or forgotten entirely. Thus it is welcome news that Ridge’s first and most important book is once again in print.

Ridge writes of cityscapes and workhouses, the life of the street and indeed the titular ghetto, with a combination of Williams’ “things” and her own particular taste for the necessary human existence—suffering, love, lust, aspiration—that goes with them. That taste lies uneasily behind the most measured of these poems, while in other moments it breaks out rampant, as in “To the American People,” a Lautreamontian exhortation at once inciting the reader and warning of what lies within:

Will you feast with me, American People?
But what have I that shall seem good to you!
On my board are bitter apples
And honey served on thorns,
And in my flagons fluid iron,
Hot from the crucibles.
How should such fare entice you!

Indeed, the spirit of Maldoror roams these pages, surveying the results of the mass industrialization that prophetic Mephistopheles had anticipated with such horror:

All day the power machines
Drone in her ears. . .
All day the fine dust flies
Till throats are parched and itch
And the heat—like a kept corpse—
Fouls to the last corner.

The book swerves from typically modernist free-verse to balladic songs evocative of an apocalyptic Wordsworth, as in “The Song of Iron”:

Charge the blast furnace, workman. . .

How golden-hot the ore is
From the cupola spurting,
Tossing the flaming petals
Over the silt and furnace ashz—
Blown leaves, devastating,
Falling about the world. . .

Out of the furnace mouth—
Out of the giant mouth—
The raging, turgid, mouth—
Fall fiery blossoms
Gold with the gold of buttercups
In a field at sunset,
Or huskier gold of dandelions,
Warmed in sun-leavings,
Or changing to the paler hue
At the creamy hearts of primroses.

Amidst such infernal settings, the working poor of the city go about their lives. Ridge peppers the longer poems with a suite of thumbnail portraits, like the piece worker who at night reads “those books that have most unset thought / New-poured and malleable” (clearly either poetry or manifestos, or both). Ridge is at her best when revealing people’s interrelationships to their surroundings, like the woman in “Spring” with “eyes like vacant lots” or the awful “fountain slobbering its stone basin,” drowning out huddled figures in a dim lit square in “Flotsam.”

Rooted in early 20th-century New York City, The Ghetto and other Poems anticipates much of what was to emerge amongst the “objectivists,” apparent in Ridge’s focus on the working poor and their intrinsic role in the composition and machinations of the city. Everywhere the city, its people, and their conditions are conjoined, as in “Faces” where “A late snow beats/ with cold white fists upon the tenements.” The conditions and exploitation of the working poor engaged with in this book carry an intense consciousness of the ongoing Great War and its implications, a tone that tempers every atmosphere in the collection. “The Everlasting Return” captures it best: set in Ancient Greece on a slave ship, when the ship and its owners come under attack the slaves are made half-free, their right hands loosened from their shackles, liberated just enough to defend their masters.

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THE COLLECTED POEMS
C.P. Cavafy
translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou
Oxford University Press ($12.95)

SELECTED POEMS
Federico García Lorca
translated by Martin Sorrell
Oxford University Press ($11.95)

by John Cunningham

The Oxford World’s Classics series has been issuing some of the finest in world literature for over 100 years; these two books are no exception. Both are bilingual editions that provide a feel for the structure of the original, even for readers who cannot understand Greek or Spanish.

Born of Greek parents, C.P. Cavafy was born and spent most of his life in Egypt—Alexandria to be precise. Peter Mackridge provides a superb introduction to Cavafy’s Collected Poems, listing as influences the Parnassian, the Symbolist, and the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. The Parnassian, represented by such French poets as Leconte de Lisle and José-Maria de Hérédia, “consists of antique scenes. . . often aspir[ing] to resemble sculptures.” The Symbolist movement, represented by such French poets as Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, “aspired to the state of music rather than sculpture, help[ing] Cavafy to make use of suggestive symbols, to express vague, fleeting impressions and feelings, and to exploit the evocative musical resources of language.” The Decadent and Aesthetic movements—represented by both English and French poets—with the former represented by Swinburne, Rosetti and Verlaine, and the latter primarily by Walter Pater, led Cavafy to develop “the view that experience is primarily an aesthetic matter, that art is the antithesis of nature, and that the senses need to be refined and new sensations pursued. . . in other words, the doctrine that art serves no social, spiritual, or moral purpose.”

Much of the subject matter of the poems relates to ancient Greek history. For example, “The Displeasure of the Seleucid” describes how when Ptolemy arrived in Syria in an impoverished condition, King Demetrius sought to restore dignity to this ruler and not have him the laughing-stock of the Romans:

This is why the Seleucid King Demetrius
was upset. And offered Ptolemy at once
robes of royal purple, a splendid diadem,
precious diamonds, numerous
servants and attendants, his most expensive horses,
that he present himself properly in Rome,
as befits an Alexandrian Greek monarch.

Another of Cavafy’s major themes was the erotic, which can be found in numerous poems, including “At The Entrance Of The Café”:

My attention was directed, by something said beside me,
toward the entrance of the café.
And I saw the lovely body that appeared
as if created by Eros in his consummate experience—

Eroticism is a theme Cavafy shares with Lorca. Another, which Lorca exhibited to a much lesser extent than Cavafy, is a Parnassian influence. Lorca’s “Elegy” captures both:

Like Ceres, you’d offer golden corn
to have sleeping love touch your body,
to have another Milky Way
flow from your virgin breasts.

You’ll wither like the magnolia.
No kisses burnt on your thighs,
no fingers in your hair,
playing it like a harp.

While both poets were influenced by music, Lorca’s was a spare, minimalist style reflecting the rhythms of Andalusia. From his volume Poemas del Cante Jondo, the poem “And After” evokes the sound of the castanets of gypsy flamenco:

The illusion of dawn
and kisses
dissolve.

Only desert
Remains.
Undulating
desert.

Similarly, in “Dawn”:

Córdoba bells
at daybreak.
Dawn bells
in Granada.
All the girls weeping
to the tender, grieving soleá
recognize you.

In The Tamarit Divan, Lorca explores the ghazal and the qasida. The former has become a common form for contemporary poets to explore, but while many U.S. and Canadian poets have used the name while ignoring the strictures of the form, Lorca held to the original requirements. In “Ghazal IX—Of Marvellous Love,” he writes:

With all the gypsum
of the badlands,
you were reed of love, moist jasmine

With south and fire
of the bad skies,
you were murmur of snow in my breast.

Lorca’s qasidas, on the other hand, do not follow the strictness of this Persian form, which generally runs for more than fifty lines. “Qasida V—Of The Open-Air Dream” shows the influence of the Surrealists:

Jasmine bloom and butchered bull
Endless paving. Map. Room. Harp. Dawn.
The girl feigns a jasmine bull
and the bull’s a bleeding sunset, bellowing.

Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias is Lorca’s most ambitious poem (and perhaps his most famous as a result of the movie The Disappearance of García Lorca). It is an elegy to a friend and aging bullfighter who attempted, at an advanced age, to fight one last bull; he was killed in the ring as a result of being gored. The first part, “Goring and Death,” contains one of Lorca’s most famous refrains, a device he was quite fond of:

At five in the afternoon
Fine on the dot after noon
A boy fetched the white sheet
at five in the afternoon
A basket of lime waiting
at five in the afternoon
After that death and only death
at five in the afternoon.

Both Cavafy and Lorca have proven to be quite influential to North American poets. These new translations offer further testimony as to the many reasons why—and for a fairly reasonable price.

Click here to purchase Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca at your local independent bookstore

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