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March 8, 2013

Fine art alive in comic form

Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix is up at the VAG until June 19.
NICOLE NOZICK

While most people are familiar with Art Spiegelman’s work – The New Yorker magazine covers, the graphic novels Maus and MetaMaus – few know much about the man himself.

Born Itzhak Avraham ben Zev in Sweden in 1948, Spiegelman’s parents were Polish Holocaust survivors who moved to the United States when he was three years old. A talented illustrator from an early age, Spiegelman made a name for himself in the underground comics world of the 1970s. His work exploded into the mainstream in 1991 with the publication of the “genre-defying” Holocaust allegory, Maus, which became the first comic to win a Pulitzer Prize the following year.

As part of their pledge to support visual culture, Vancouver Art Gallery is presenting Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps, which profiles Spiegelman’s career. Opened on Feb. 16, this is the first retrospective of the acclaimed cartoonist, and the second time VAG has collaborated with the artist, who was co-curator and featured artist in the gallery’s groundbreaking 2008 exhibit Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art. This is the first major exhibition of his work since the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s exhibition of Maus in 1992. Among the sponsors is our local community’s Silber Family Foundation, which provided lead support for the show.

Often referred to as the father of the graphic novel, a phrase that does not thrill him (“I keep demanding blood tests because I just think I made a very long comic book”), Spiegelman’s artistic output is prolific. Now in his 60s, his art remains current, vibrant and exciting, his finger on the pulse of contemporary culture, his sense of irony as sharp as ever. Just as “obsessed with comics” as he ever was, Spiegelman is “celebrating the most fertile period since the beginnings of comics in 1895.”

At a preview event, Spiegelman was in attendance and spoke candidly, at times flippantly, about the fraught relationship he had with his father, his mother’s suicide, his views on Israel, his fixation with smoking and his brief sojourn in a psychiatric hospital when he was in his 20s.

Accompanied by his wife of more than 30 years, Françoise Mouly (herself an acclaimed artist, editor, designer and the art director at The New Yorker) and Bruce Grenville, VAG’s senior curator, the diminutive, dapper artist led reporters on a two-hour tour of the exhibit, stopping often to ruminate on what he called “touchstones” and “key moments” in his artistic career and in life.

Co-Mix is set up more or less chronologically, “so if you’re not sure where to go, you go to your left,” Spiegelman explained, taking the tour on a journey through his life and revealing how his art evolved as he did: “one room is my ‘juvenalia,’ the other room is whatever comes after that and, before the ‘senalia’ of the last room,” he joked, “… in this room is the underlying lab … here is where I found my own voice as a cartoonist.”

A chronic smoker for much of his life, Spiegelman drew almost continuously on an electronic cigarette, its blue tip lighting up on the inhale, and its innocuous smoke-like vapor pouring out on the exhale. “I smoke the digital inside and the analogue outside,” he said to this reporter in an aside, grinning impishly. Known in certain circles for having a “smoking allowed indoors” clause in his contracts in previous years, Spiegelman has clearly, albeit reluctantly, adapted to the times, exemplified by the ubiquitous electronic device.

About his maligned accessory, Spiegelman quipped, “It’s certainly better than nothing because it allows me out into the world, otherwise I’m kind of like in house arrest. I gave up smoking for a year … all I did was not smoke, that was my gig.… I was, for a while, writing lists: 12 sticks of chewing gum, four teabags, eight cups of coffee … one sheet-rock wall damaged by fist, you know, that was my day and it never got better. After that year, I didn’t know if I was going to live longer, but I felt like I had lived forever and didn’t want to live another day. I had to go back to what worked for me, which was smoking….”

A substantial portion of the retrospective is dedicated to Maus, Spiegelman’s seminal work, 13 years in the making, the work he considers one of his “great achievements.” The Maus-related displays include research material, preliminary sketches, family photos, early drafts, storyboards and a four-page comic segment, Prisoner on a Hill, depicting the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother.

“Maus was always supposed to be a small intimate thing, one to one, I wanted all my mistakes and wobbles present,” said Spiegelman standing beside a display of an early three-page version of the novel, which was later expanded to 300 pages. Leading the tour to an adjoining room, the artist pointed to an enormous facsimile of the first Maus book, which covers one wall. “I wanted one piece that was appropriate museum scale,” he explained, “so I took the entire book and let it be a Jackson Pollock-size picture.” Spiegelman hopes gallery visitors will stare at the huge canvas while they listen to a recording of his father’s voice, which plays in a background loop. This four-hour interview with his father was the first of many that laid the groundwork for the entire Maus project.

Spiegelman makes no bones of the fact that the relationship with his father was fraught but said that the interviewing process became a way for the estranged father and son to communicate again. “I found that the process of interviewing my father was our relationship, and I figured it would be nice to have some sort of relationship with him because I couldn’t avoid him [anymore] … I found it useful at the time when I was really freaked out about having anything to do with him, like, having garlic for a werewolf or a crucifix for a vampire. To have a microphone … allowed me, when we were finished, to say, OK, tell me more. This was the same basic trajectory that we covered for the next five years or so – there were many more interviews, but this is the core one that allowed the book to happen.”

Spiegelman, encouraged he said by Mouly, has created a substantial body of work for children. “Françoise, who has been my lifelong collaborator since our lives crossed, kind of ushered me into a) having kids and b) making books for them,” he said. Together, they collaborated and in 2000 published Little Lit, a series of children’s anthologies featuring comics, illustrations and stories from, among others, Maurice Sendak, Paul Auster and Lemony Snicket.

Spiegelman is a strong advocate of using comics as early readers for children. “Comics are really useful to help kids crack the code of reading…. [Comics] make it easier to learn how to read and are worth reading more than once,” he said. The child-oriented portfolio is featured in the exhibit, collected in a display that includes Little Lit and other child-oriented comics and interactive computer screens, “so you can park the kids in this room while looking at the pornography in the other room,” Spiegelman said with a chuckle. The display also includes an anthology of comics from the 1930s to the 1950s. “I want to keep the legacy [of comics] alive for children,” he added.

Spiegelman, who has lived in New York since 1975, said he was personally deeply affected by the events that took place in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. His art-based response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre is well documented in the retrospective. It includes the New Yorker cover “Ground Zero” (a black on black cover created in collaboration with Mouly) and the comic In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman’s first book-length comic since Maus.

“Sept. 11 happened in our neighborhood and we ran down to get our daughter out of the first day or second day of high school … which is right under the towers. We were there when the towers tumbled around us. So, that’s kind of unhinging.... I just became obsessed with doing pages about Sept. 11 and its political aftermath despite never wanting to be a political cartoonist because I assumed that political cartoons have the shelf life of yogurt.” He added, “These [drawings] were done at a moment when I was really waiting for another shoe to drop, I didn’t think that New York City would really last that much longer and I was just waiting for another terrorist event in the wake of one that was genuinely terrifying….”

The comic Spiegelman created out of this, In the Shadow of No Towers, was a series commissioned by the German newspaper Die Zeit. He struggled to find a U.S. publisher. “I was just working on one page at a time without a vague notion of posterity,” he said. “When the world quieted down, and I quieted down, it was allowed to come out as a book that was seen as rather unpatriotic at the time, nobody really wanted to publish it. The Jewish [newspaper] the Forward, gave me the ‘right of return’ – ‘Our politics and yours don’t agree,’ they said, ‘but that’s alright, you’re a Jew,’ and they printed [some of them].” In the Shadow of No Towers was eventually published in 2004 by Pantheon in a board-book format.

One vast VAG room is dedicated to Spiegelman’s New Yorker magazine covers. The room is dominated by one of the most recognizable images of that magazine’s more recent history – a Chassidic Jew and an African-American woman locked in a passionate embrace. This striking image, which blazoned the cover of the magazine’s 1993 Valentines’ Day issue, was Spiegelman’s first for the magazine. He said it was intended as a reference to the racially motivated riots in Crown Heights two years prior. The publication of the image caused an outcry. Over his 10 years as a New Yorker employee, Spiegelman had 21 of his cover images published. While many were controversial, it was this first one which proved to be a watershed. This cover, Spiegelman said, standing in front of the blown-up image, “helped to change the DNA of The New Yorker by helping to make them less genteel….” Spiegelman is proud of his influence on the magazine.

During the VAG tour, Spiegelman was asked by a Haaretz reporter if he would ever do a comic book about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While he had once considered it, he said, he had decided to leave that task to “smarter” writers such as Amos Oz and John Sacco.

“I realized that whatever I did would be met with fury, but no understanding … I am so f—-ing lucky my father came to America rather than move to Israel after World War Two … I am grateful for the good luck.… I can afford to be a Diaspora Jew, I don’t have to take on being a fascist as a response to [the war], that’s just too big a burden and I’m glad to not have it.” Spiegelman’s views about Israel are unequivocal: “I understand how fraught it all is but there’s something wrong with the idea of Israel from the beginning. You know, after World War Two, when we saw what the horrors of nationalism brought the world to, maybe it was a good idea to have a real ‘united nations’ rather than say, ‘Oh, OK, you were the losers so we’ll give you a little slice of nation to protect like the rest of us….’ If there was going to be a [Jewish] nation it should have been Germany and if that didn’t happen this was just a slice of it.”

The focus of the tour, however, was, of course, Spiegelman’s art, as is that of the exhibit. Despite “trying to find out what’s left of me after a retrospective,” Spiegelman has several projects on the horizon, including a cross-genre collaboration to be performed at the Sydney Opera House this September. It is clear that this artist is showing no sign of slowing down, just yet.

Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps is at VAG until June 9.

Nicole Nozick is a Vancouver freelance writer and director of the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival.

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