Talk Like A Pirate Day – September 19

Man the windlass!  Hoist the mainsail!  Avast!

Arggghhhh!!!

Late last week, word began circulating that cartoonist Art Spiegleman, exhibitor in and consultant to the Masters of American Comics show, was withdrawing his original works from that show.  Speculation and rumors abounded, but today Spiegelman–in an effort to explain his motivations for the seemingly sudden withdrawl–publicly released to journalists an email he had originally sent in January to the organizers of the show.  Whatever one may think of Spiegelman’s cartooning work, he’s undeniably well-spoken, intelligent and media-savvy… which is why I find the email in question so baffling.

Here’re the various points he brings up and why I find them somewhat odd:

• He learned that the exhibition would be travelling after the fact and was concerned about damage to his originals.  If so, why allow them to go to Milwaukee, but then once already there in New York, take them?  It’s not as if they would have travelled any more if they’d been left in NYC for the duration of the show.
• He needs his originals for in-progress publications.  So–again–why wait until now?  This really doesn’t seem like the actions of someone operating on a specific schedule.  Did Pantheon (his publisher) need the originals the day of the opening?  If there’s a date that they’re needed, why allow them to be set up for the show, then storm in and withdraw them at show openining?
• Two locations vs. one.  I can’t even make sense of what he’s getting at here.  He seems at first to indicate that he thinks everything should be in one venue, as in Milwaukee, but then says that having the exhibit split in the original Hammer Museum show “made an impressive statement about the momentousness of the occasion.”  In New York, though, “the carefully constructed arguments of the exhibit devolve into a woeful heap of unintended consequences.” (Apparently because of the show being again split between two venues?)
• ”
  I know that the two East Coast destinations, hardly as prestigious as the MOCA and Hammer…”  My gut’s telling me that this may be the real reason–or at least a big chunk of it–for Spiegelman’s withdrawl from the show.  Especially given the following: “…getting New Yorkers to cross the Hudson to New Jersey is far more difficult than inducing Angelinos to brave a freeway.”  It’s the age-old New Yorker disdain for New Jerseyans… New Jerseyites… or whatever they’re called.  I say, replace the Spiegelman pieces with some Springstein memorabilia!
• Too Jewey vs. not Jewey enough. This whole section’s a hot potato, but it seems to start with Spiegelman saying that an insufficient number of  the cartoonists exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New Jersey are “card-carrying Jews” (or, as my friend Larry refers to his bretheren, “one of the tribe”), but then shifts to him saying that having the work shown in the Jewish Museum potentially reduces the perception of the artistic validity of the work to “some sort of ‘ethnic’ phenomenon.”  This last point actually makes some sense to me now that I think about it–but, honestly, beyond thinking “a lot of those comic book guys were Jewish, so I guess that’s why it’s at the Jewish Museum,” I’d never thought much about it.

If the man wants to withdraw his work, then he’s got every right to do it.  It just seems odd to me, given the reasoning in the email he’s made available.  I encourage you to read the email itself though, since I’ve been known to miss some pretty obvious stuff before. 

And, honestly, if I’d had to pick one cartoonist from this exhibit to lose, it’d have been Spiegelman or Gary Panter.  The importance of Maus is undeniable, but there really wasn’t much from that book up at the exhibit.  His earlier stuff is interesting on a formalistic level, but I don’t think the average museum-goer would really get much from viewing the originals thereof, and the Shadow of No Towers stuff was just printouts (since it was all drawn on the computer) and seemed really out of place.

That being said, the best case scenario would really have been to have all of Spiegelman’s works in place as they had been for the previous two shows and it’s unfortunate that they’ve been withdrawn whatever the reasons.