Glen Baxter

A SPATE OF HEPWORTH RUSTLING WAS SPREADING ALARM ALONG THE TEXAS BORDER.
This was in the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of the ‘Cult Fiction: Art and Comics Exhibition’, September 21st-November 11th, 2007. This touring exhibition featured a selection of graphic novels, sculpture, fine art, illustration and comics. The premise of the show was to examine the relationship between these disciplines. Glen Baxter contributed two pieces to ‘Cult Fiction’, “Looks like you’re slipping inexorably into figuration” 2006 and A spate of Hepworth rustling was spreading alarm along the Texas border, 2006, both placed in the second room of the show (along with their incredibly long titles).
The piece entitled A spate of Hepworth rustling was spreading alarm along the Texas border is set at twilight and shows a pulp fiction style cowboy complete with a bandit’s neck-a-chief, stealing a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Interestingly both of the art works by Baxter show cowboys juxtaposed with works of fine art as well as concepts from the world of modern art. I find the size of the work remarkable when you consider the media in which the work was created. At 134cm by 108cm, giving just over one square metre, all coloured in pencil crayon, this seems a painstaking approach to image generation at this scale. This adds a certain amount of value to an image which itself is not overtly complex outside of its context of the humour.
Glen Baxter was born in Leeds and studied at Leeds College of Art and Design. He describes his attitude to his work as ‘a deadpan Buster Keaton kind of approach’. This is no more apparent than his representation of a cowboy on a horse, stealing a stone Hepworth sculpture, possibly weighing over a tonne. Although it does not appear to be a direct representation of an actual Hepworth sculpture, its form signifies her abstract organic style. The hole in the sculpture is a strong reference point because Hepworth was the first modern sculptor to use this in her work (e.g. Pierced Form of the early 1930s).
The composition of the image placed above text is very reminiscent of the Farside cartoons by Gary Larson. The newspaper style, one frame comic and punch-line humour attracted my attention in the gallery, but also made me want to investigate the image further, because like Larson after the initial one liner there is normally another subtler joke hidden in a expression or gesture. This is true of Baxter’s work in this case as well, the cowboy checking over his shoulder casts a comically rye squinting gaze for would be pursuers or the rightful owners of the stolen sculpture which is as important as the statement beneath the image. The whole image has particular significance if you think retrospectively about the time it was produced (2006). Baxter is obviously referencing real life ‘rustling’ of a Henry Moore and Elizabeth Frink taken from The Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, respectively.
Going back to the obvious juxtaposition of cowboys and a Modernist sculpture, I wonder if this is a metaphor for the relationship between comic book illustration and fine art. Rough course men like cowboys are not unlike how patrons of fine art view the work of comic books, and what better icon of high arts refinery and sophistication than the clean organic forms of Dame Barbara Hepworth. So is one stealing from the other? Are they equal? Is there a dependency of one on the other, but with benefits for both? Is Baxter feeding off Hepworth’s place in the canon, but at the same time raising awareness and introducing new audiences to her work, like a symbiotic parasite? Yes to all of the above and that is why it is so important.
In conclusion, I find Baxter’s work funny and well informed. It’s easily conceivable how Baxter could gather a cult following, I am curious to find out more about him and from this will actively hunt out any shows, books or catalogues which include his work.

CULT FICTION Art and Comics

ARRGH I DIDN'T WRITE THIS REVIEW,BUT I'VE LOST WHO DID, AND I DONT WANT TO REMOVE IT BECAUSE ITS GOOD
Cult Fiction explores the reciprocal relationship between comics and art. The exhibition foregrounds links between the two genres in works where current social and political issues are aired in frank visual narratives.
The visual language of comics and graphic novels has influenced many contemporary artists, who have employed its conventions of pictorial narrative and unique fusion of word and image. Fine artists Adam Dant, Kerry James Marshall and Olivia Plender have published their own comics attracted by the mediums democratic format and its ability to reach and influence a wider audience than a gallery context would permit. Glen Baxter, Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley use a combination of word and image in forms that are reminiscent of popular cartoons. The recurring themes and characters typical of comics iconography can be seen in Laylah Ali’s cast of bowling-ball headed characters, or the ragged furry felines that appear in Jon Pylypchuk’s sculptural tableaux. Liz Craft, Kerstin Kartscher and Paul McDevitt employ graphic elements from comic book imagery to create works that suggest narrative without using words.
The comics artists and graphic novelists are mainly from the generation of independent author-draughtsmen, whose subject matter tends to be offbeat and transgressive, and sometimes controversial. ‘Real life issues’, often approached in biographical or autobiographical styles, supplant moralistic tales of good and evil. Julie Doucet’s diaristic portrayals of her character in vulnerable and compromising situations exemplify the genre’s ability to communicate difficult emotional information, as do Debbie Drechsler’s candid autobiographic explorations of childhood abuse. The true realities of life within a war zone are sensitively charted in Joe Sacco’s award-winning Palestine, while everyday characters such as R Crumb’s and Harvey Pekar’s file clerk in American Splendor and Daniel Clowes’ misfit David Boring become unlikely heroes of everyday tales. Classic Literature gets a make-over for the twenty-first century in Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery which is based on Flaubert’s adulterous heroine Madame Bovary, and Melinda Gebbie’s and Alan Moore’s epic Lost Girls (shortly to be published in the UK) charts the sexual awakening of three characters from children’s literature – Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Wendy from Peter Pan – as told by their older selves.

Artists: Laylah Ali, Glen Baxter, Stéphane Blanquet, Daniel Clowes, Liz Craft, R. Crumb, Adam Dant, Julie Doucet, Debbie Drechsler, Marcel Dzama, Melinda Gebbie in collaboration with Alan Moore, Mark Kalesniko, Kerstin Kartscher, Killoffer, Kerry James Marshall, Chad McCail, Paul McDevitt, Travis Millard, Kim L Pace, Raymond Pettibon, Olivia Plender, Jon Pylypchuk, James Pyman, Joe Sacco, David Shrigley in collaboration with Yoshitomo Nara and Chris Shepherd, Posy Simmonds, Richard Slee, Carol Swain
Cult Fiction was originated by artist and curator, Kim L. Pace, and is co-curated with Hayward curator Emma Mahony. A fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Jacob Covey, Art Director of Fantagraphics Books, features essays by Paul Gravett and Emma Mahony and a picture-essay by Kim L. Pace. All of the participating artists in Cult Fiction have contributed a drawn self-portrait together with their handwritten answers to questions posed by the curators. The book is distributed by Cornerhouse Publications.

Nufonia Must Fall by Kid Koala

Highbrow lowbrow art

Nufonia Must Fall is probably the world's first comic by someone with a cartoon-character side persona. In this case, that would be Montreal DJ Kid Koala, probably best known for being part of the animated pop super-group Gorillaz.

And what a project Koala has turned in: a graphic novel that is 300-plus pages, almost entirely dialogue-free, and drawn in bleak charcoal hues. It's too bookish and highbrow to be a mere comic book, yet also too slapstick-y and hastily drawn to feel completely literary. In a world where Dave Sim and Alan Moore clearly try to bridge the gaps between the planes between pop art and something much more rarified, Koala's graphic novel seems to occupy a bizarre space in-between.

While Nufonia certainly isn't flawless for all its invention, the book is still strangely compelling when thumbed through quickly. (The entire thing can be devoured in no more than 15 minutes.)

Koala, whose real name is Eric San, has had a long-standing fascination with the sequential arts long before he allowed himself to be rendered into a two-dimensional member of Gorillaz, which also features Blur's Damon Albarn, hip-hop producer Dan the Automator and Del the Funkee Homosapien, among others.

Koala's last solo disc, 2000's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome , even came with a small bonus comic book far superior to the CD itself -- a sometimes hard to take, stream-of- consciousness pastiche created from his sprawling, eclectic music collection.

Nufonia, however, is the exact inverse: the book is the main attraction here. At the same time, the accompanying 16-minute CD of ambient incidental music isn't a mere trinket. It's actually an improvement over Carpal . (More about that in a moment.)

In Nufonia, we meet a headphones-wearing robot facing impending obsolesce at his cafeteria job who, additionally, has trouble standing on its own two feet. So when it falls for a cute office drone, a human electrical engineer, it really falls for her in the most literal sense. However, she's charmingly won over by the nameless robot's clumsiness, despite also harboring reservations about its imperfections. While the robot goes about writing love songs for its newfound source of admiration, she goes about internally picking daisies: Will she or won't she come to love the imperfect machine?

This has sort of topic has been tackled before elsewhere, but it's the medium that Koala uses, and the way he uses it, to express his point that is simply novel. The book is infectiously drawn in sketchy pencil lines and colored in murky black-and-white textures, a style that has been favorably compared to the feel of an old silent movie by other reviewers. You can sometimes see the sprocket holes, however. The world these characters inhabit occasionally has trouble containing itself within its own borders, as though Koala couldn't wait to let his thoughts and ideas pour out onto paper. The few words that are sparingly peppered throughout Nufonia sometimes leak out of their confined spaces.

This failure to stay within the lines appears to be an amateurish mistake at first glance, but, on second observation, the book could very well be a treatise on the perils of perfectionism. Koala has told interviewers that he felt an inordinate amount of pressure delivering a debut record other people wanted to hear, so he made one for himself instead. This, of course, turned out to be the dreary Carpal Tunnel Syndrome .

But where that record was needlessly self-indulgent, Nufonia effortlessly opens into the realm of communal, shared experience. Koala has learned something over three years, it seems: if you're going to create something, you'd better make it something that resonates with someone else.

By stripping away names and dialogue, Koala gives his characters an every-person kind of quality that transcends cultural or gender identity. While it is easy to slip into the poor robot's shoes, just about everyone in Nufonia shares his problem: they wander about, clumsily incomplete in their own ways, often paranoid that some impending sense of failure might gum up the works. And when things do go wrong, they're all caddish enough to take their frustration out on the next person down the food chain.

On a more microcosmic level, Nufonia sees Koala recovering from the sins of Carpal without resorting to kicking anyone in the street. The book's incidental CD is quiet and sullen, and successfully accentuates the somewhat downbeat yet whimsical atmosphere of the book. The 10 'songs' here can probably even be described as a much less-visceral distant cousin to Tom Waits's junkyard cabaret. Think Town With No Cheer from Swordfishtrombones and you'd be along the right track.

However, trying to actually enjoy the CD along with the book is something of an unintentional challenge. Page numbers on the compact disc's outer label seem to indicate that certain tracks are only meant to be played against key sections of Nufonia . Due to some kind of publishing oversight, these numbers are rather puzzlingly only listed on the CD's label itself, and the book offers no further instructions as to how you can align the disc with the book.

Maybe this error is the whole point. Or perhaps that's reading too much into it.

Make no mistake, though, Nufonia Must Fall is as compulsively 'readable' as a child's flipbook, where you absolutely must get to that very next page as quickly as possible to not shatter any momentum. True, $25 might seem to be a rather hefty price for such a simple pleasure. Yet, Koala has done something truly worthy here: he has created an imperfectly perfect two-dimensional work of art. We can only wonder what this cartoon kid might have up his sleeve next.