I was flooded out of my apartment in 2023, and the resulting disorder has taken me a couple of years to work through. Adapt to? I believe I’d gone on a break from the cartoon before then, but it’s only now in the fall of ‘26 that I feel as though I can begin to sustain a routine.
There is a therapeutic element to my making art, of course, and I’ve always unironically said the primary motivation behind the strip is to keep me from killing myself. So, it does feel enlivening to be sitting down and working on it once again. The therapy is largely tied to the focused time listening to music on headphones. I have missed that.
Something switched on in my brain and I started rapidly generating comic ideas. Joseph Beuys was prominent for some reason. His Earth Telephone figured in some of my best strips back in 2018, and he’d been nagging at me for some reason, even though I don’t really know all that much about him. I think I’d been mulling on Herzog, and his admonition that our culture lacked ‘adequate images,’ and there was something about Beuys that felt of the moment.
At one point I also wrote down the the narrative, “Our story, with no beginning or end, told to no one,” and that felt like a good re-entry point. A kind of, “here we go again, telling nonsense to an empty house...what’s the point, really?” Which immediately struck me as inappropriate for Beuys – it seemed more a Samuel Beckett brand of nihilism.
But there was something about Bueys’ ‘every one is an artist,’ which, particularly coming from Goddard, has a tainted and tired triteness about it. But with Bueys – and it’s easy to forget how energizing this was back in the 60’s and 70’s – that statement was a call to action for everyone to engage in applying creative thinking toward their lives, regardless of their occupation. In this way he was a populist revolutionary, like so many people and movements at the time that sought to revision the planet and humanity’s place on it. Bueys’ bizarre Actions spoke to how we are governed by fundamental archetypal elements, and how it is our duty to work to use those elements to come up with sustainable solutions. The word that he repeatedly invoked in this venture was ‘Re-Form’. That was what we were to do.
So, in that way, the comic made sense. I cannot write out my sense of futility, or my impulse toward anonymity, (or, at least, toward shelter from the noise of the world). But that futility sits side by side with a sober understanding that I do have a duty to participate, whatever that might mean, and to try to re-form the world. And, honestly, that directive is clearly as needed now as it ever was.
The first panel is from a photograph of Beuys lecturing at an ‘Information Action’ on February 26, 1972, and is attributed to Simon Wilson, part of the the Tate Archive Photographic Collection. The second panel is a manipulation of an image of Beuys striding toward the viewer, taken by Giancarlo Pancaldi (?). The third panel is from a photo of Beuys’ sculpture “Torso” (1949-51) – photographer unknown. (I think maybe this lives in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.) The fourth panel is a representation of Scala Libera, 1985, one of his latest works.
Aside from the invocation to start again and effect change, I’m seeing these images as a piecing together of an identity, and rigging, even if only tentatively, the means by which one might ascend. A starting (again) place.
I was flooded out of my apartment in 2023, and the resulting disorder has taken me a couple of years to work through. Adapt to? I believe I’d gone on a break from the cartoon before then, but it’s only now in the fall of ‘26 that I feel as though I can begin to sustain a routine.
ReplyDeleteThere is a therapeutic element to my making art, of course, and I’ve always unironically said the primary motivation behind the strip is to keep me from killing myself. So, it does feel enlivening to be sitting down and working on it once again. The therapy is largely tied to the focused time listening to music on headphones. I have missed that.
Something switched on in my brain and I started rapidly generating comic ideas. Joseph Beuys was prominent for some reason. His Earth Telephone figured in some of my best strips back in 2018, and he’d been nagging at me for some reason, even though I don’t really know all that much about him. I think I’d been mulling on Herzog, and his admonition that our culture lacked ‘adequate images,’ and there was something about Beuys that felt of the moment.
At one point I also wrote down the the narrative, “Our story, with no beginning or end, told to no one,” and that felt like a good re-entry point. A kind of, “here we go again, telling nonsense to an empty house...what’s the point, really?” Which immediately struck me as inappropriate for Beuys – it seemed more a Samuel Beckett brand of nihilism.
But there was something about Bueys’ ‘every one is an artist,’ which, particularly coming from Goddard, has a tainted and tired triteness about it. But with Bueys – and it’s easy to forget how energizing this was back in the 60’s and 70’s – that statement was a call to action for everyone to engage in applying creative thinking toward their lives, regardless of their occupation. In this way he was a populist revolutionary, like so many people and movements at the time that sought to revision the planet and humanity’s place on it. Bueys’ bizarre Actions spoke to how we are governed by fundamental archetypal elements, and how it is our duty to work to use those elements to come up with sustainable solutions. The word that he repeatedly invoked in this venture was ‘Re-Form’. That was what we were to do.
So, in that way, the comic made sense. I cannot write out my sense of futility, or my impulse toward anonymity, (or, at least, toward shelter from the noise of the world). But that futility sits side by side with a sober understanding that I do have a duty to participate, whatever that might mean, and to try to re-form the world. And, honestly, that directive is clearly as needed now as it ever was.
The first panel is from a photograph of Beuys lecturing at an ‘Information Action’ on February 26, 1972, and is attributed to Simon Wilson, part of the the Tate Archive Photographic Collection. The second panel is a manipulation of an image of Beuys striding toward the viewer, taken by Giancarlo Pancaldi (?). The third panel is from a photo of Beuys’ sculpture “Torso” (1949-51) – photographer unknown. (I think maybe this lives in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.) The fourth panel is a representation of Scala Libera, 1985, one of his latest works.
Aside from the invocation to start again and effect change, I’m seeing these images as a piecing together of an identity, and rigging, even if only tentatively, the means by which one might ascend. A starting (again) place.