Hoppy Spadge

By Racey Helps

Micheangelo Pistoletto in Philadelphia

So, Michelangelo Pistoletto. I had no idea what to expect. I had heard my wife's recounting of a review in our local paper, Today's Sunbeam, but aside form that I just knew something interesting was going to be at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I won't attempt to play art critic, but I was knocked out by the installation. His Wikipedia entry states: "His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk." and it's the whole immersion effect from that gesamtkunstwerk (if you read that entry) that grabs you. There's a lot of .... Italian 60's zeitgeisty vibe. I felt like I was in early Fellini or Antonioni Land, yet any of the works could've been considered contemporary (maybe because art is dead?). Polished steel mirrors with either silkscreened or painted-on-tissue then applied images, and assemblages that were just overwhelming in how they captured domestic vs. of-the-outside-world existence. All of it was gut level - no emperor's clothes or intellectually abstruse concept puzzles. It was just - wow. If he shows up in your city - go.

Uncanny Old Gags Series - Gary Lee-Nova

As it turns out BC artist Gary Lee-Nova shares an admiration for one of the artists that provided me awe when I was a youth (along with Oldenburg, Kienholz, Yokoo, Rauschenberg, Mel Ramos et al.....) Jess.

It's difficult to find examples of his work online, but below are a couple most notably one of the Tricky Cad

click above 4 McHuge
"pasteups" Series (I got to see a real one, up close, at the Art Institute of Chicago years ago. Wow.) Now that art is dead, (I mean seriously, at this point in history a buncha millionaires collectively deciding anything NEW is worth a lot of money is just insane and they can all get advice from overpaid bullshitting experts in their little masturbatory money wasting clubhouse, while the rest of the world creates art for everybody.) I figure I can offer my view with the best of them - and that's all I'm doing - opining. Folks say he was proto-pop (using comics as a medium prior to Lichtenstein's use of single panels) or post dada (his syntactical structure freeing the eye in the talk balloons of the Tricky Cad series) but I say alot of his non-Tricky Cad work

click above 4 McHuge
also prefigures Robert Williams, (even though I don't know if Williams ever even saw his work) too, so he might be the Grandaddy of outsider art as well. Or it's all just synergy x zeitgeist = WTF.

But creative concepts can lie dormant like bacteria on the lunar lander camera or in a bee's gut in amber, only to be revived through a parthenogenesis that lets artists, once they know it's OK for an idea to thrive, to produce work relating to it - so back to Gary, who has worked on a series called Uncanny Old Gags, which remixes Nancy comics with results that while not directly related to Jess' work is equally interesting. He has greenlighted me sharing these here and has shown me some NEW works which seem as compelling if not more..... so here's 4 pieces in a combination of pasteups and silkscreens (Correct me if I'm wrong, Gary) using his current idiom of remixed comics - 2 are entitled Uncanny Old Gags, which I will restate is an anagram of Nancy and Sluggo.

So-
Here are the works:

Uncanny Old Gags #1:


click for big already!!

Uncanny Old Gags #3:


ick-clay or-fay ig-bay

Nancy & Parrot:


1. hover mouse over image 2. click left mouse button (mac users click, uh, button) 3. enjoy larger image

Nancy Pencil:


click=big ^^^^^^^^^

Bonus: here's a link to a book on Jess

Uncanny Nancy

Gary Lee-Nova, noted British Columbia artist ( works here, here, here and here)
sent me something wonderful and marginally eerie. Note date in lower left corner of panel:



Here's the entire strip for 9/11/57: (click to embiggen)



Professor Lee-Nova also points out, "FYI, an anagram of "Nancy And Sluggo" is Uncanny Old Gags !"

Sends chills down your Bushmiller, don't it?