'Splat' a messy look at comics' influence

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 9/19/2003

Splat Boom Pow!
The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art and Douglas R. Weathersby/Environmental Services
At: the Institute of Contemporary Art,
through Jan. 4. 617-266-5152

For a show called "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art," the Institute of Contemporary Art's new offering is oddly flat. This look at the influence of cartoons on artists inspires not more exclamation points, but phrases such as "a worthy service to the field."

The field is art history, and this traveling exhibition organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston takes its contribution seriously. It diligently argues that cartoons and comic books have influenced three generations of artists, from Mel Ramos to Takashi Murakami, who was born in 1962, the year Ramos painted his "Captain Midnight."

From the late 1950s onward, pop culture broadened its reach. It would be surprising, especially in the wake of the macho pretentions of Abstract Expressionism, if visual artists didn't pick up on it. The clearest case of a painter who abandoned heavy-handed abstract gloom in favor of a jumpy, ostensibly jokey, cartoonish figuration is Philip Guston, who, alas, isn't in the show. (He is discussed in its catalog.)

There aren't any actual cartoons in the exhibition. It assumes your familiarity with them, and your ability to make a mental leap from that knowledge to what's on the ICA's walls. That's doable. What isn't, though, is making sense of it all.

The 40 artists in the show sprawl in almost the same number of directions. The works don't speak to one another, and often not to the viewer, either, at least not this one. I wish the exhibition had focused on fewer artists and shown how cartoons affected their work over time. This is no simple matter, because late 20th-century artists borrowed like magpies. Andy Warhol's serial imagery comes from the frame-by-frame format of comics, sure -- but also from the multiple portraits of saints in the iconostasis in the Pittsburgh church where he spent his Sundays as a youth.

The show touches on several rather hackneyed themes: cartoon iconography used to criticize everything from consumerism to the Vietnam War; cartoon techniques used in "serious" painting, the most famous example being Roy Lichtenstein's Benday dots; and cartoons used as a jumping-off point for artists who mined such sources as graffiti or created their own characters and myths.

The opening salvo is Ramos's "Captain Midnight." What's interesting is that the artist painted the comic hero as if he were a classical one, putting him in a tondo within the rectangular canvas. Ramos also ignores the flatness of comics in favor of very obvious, painterly brush strokes.

Real cartoons aren't often subtle, but Candida Alvarez's "Watch My Back" certainly is. At first, it looks like a black monochrome a la Kasimir Malevich. Closer inspection reveals the figure of Babar, the lovable elephant protagonist of children's books, stitched with black thread on black fabric. Turning away from us, he seems about to disappear into a void.

Jennifer Zackin, one of the younger artists in the show, arranges hundreds of plastic action figures on a circular platform. Battalions of tiny soldiers, firemen, and police stand at the ready. In the center are a quartet of Wonder Woman figures, on a larger scale than the others. The piece reads as goddess worship from some arcane culture. Dara Birnbaum and Liza Lou also look at the role of women. Birnbaum's "Technology/

Transformation" is an update on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." A brief, looped piece of footage from television's "Wonder Woman," it shows the merely mortal Diana Prince whirling herself into the female superhero over and over, emphasizing her duality. Lou's life-size "Business Barbie" is ultra-glamorous, with her Chanel suit made of glass beads and a coiffeur that redefines "big hair": It looks like blond elephant ears. The regulars of the '80s East Village scene are in the show: Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat. So are big names: Sigmar Polke, for one, with one of his polka dot pictures. And there are surprises, including a series of storytelling drawings by Henry Darger, who died in the early '70s. The magnum opus of Darger, a self-taught recluse, is a 15,000-page epic with a title on the same scale: "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." The half dozen narrative drawings in the ICA show are in the gentle style and soft palette of 19th-century children's book illustrations. The story, though, is filled with prepubescent nude transsexuals and violence. While much of cartooning is a way of dealing with the real world, Darger has created an entire alternative one.

Weathersby mops up There's a curious residue of "Splat Boom Pow!" in the other current show at the ICA, "Douglas R. Weathersby/Environmental Services." That's appropriate: Residue is Weathersby's medium. The winner of the ICA's 2003 Artist Prize cleans -- the ICA itself at the moment -- and arranges the collected dirt, dust, and detritus into shadowy sculptures. What he shares with the cartoon folks is taking the mundane and making it something more.

Atop a large quarter circle of debris on the ICA's mezzanine floor stands a bucket with mop, rubber gloves, and other cleaning aids. A 15-minute video collage plays on the opposite wall. It's composed of close-ups that conceal rather than reveal what you're looking at. White flakes fall, white powders rise; shapes are intriguingly illegible until the moment when Weathersby's hand enters the picture. He's scrubbing -- at one point on a drain in a basement sink. (Robert Gober and Gregory Crewdson, better-known artists than Weathersby, also use drains. Do we have a show-worthy trend here?) The once-filthy sink is now clean, except for a patch of crud that the artist left in situ: It's in the shape of the faucet's shadow.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can watch a live video feed on another wall, showing Weathersby slaving away in the bowels of the building. And if all this isn't enough for you, there's a sign-up sheet in the gallery. You, too, can have your dust made into an ephemeral conceptual art work.