February 16, 2006
Psycho-sodomy
It’s always a treat to hear one artist talk about another. In a recent public appearance Gary Panter gave his take on Jack Kirby. These guys are the hands-down gods of their respective generations. Neither should require much of an introduction. Panter, famous for his Jimbo comics and his set designs for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, talked about how the “broken line” opened things up for him, and deserves every bit the same accolades as his punk icon peer Raymond Pettibon. More than a stylist like Pettibon, Panter is a deft assimilator, easily going nuclear when necessary with psychedelic abstractions that freely reference modern art. And then there is Kirby. What can you say about the man? He single-handedly reinvented drawing. Despite his downplay, Panter, like so many others, owes his fair share to Kirby’s lead. Not that their styles are in any way similar. Kirby updated mythology for the 20th-century. Kirby’s characters were quite literally the new gods of the modern world. Sometimes, as with Thor, they were the old gods made new, but often, like Galactus, along with just about every other self-conscious superhero Kirby invented, and he was tireless, these were the industrial era, space age successors of the historical standards. Kirby did two major things where the art of visual storytelling was concerned. In retrospect they might not seem like much. He introduced sequential motion to action sequences, an unparalleled dynamicism, and his characters, no matter how far out, were psychological. Kirby was amazingly aware of what he was doing. To read his interviews is a revelation. What is striking is the degree to which he was reacting to the perceived deficiencies in the genre. It should provide inspiration to struggling contemporary artists that much of what motivated Kirby was his own frustration with what he felt was an art form that had grown complacent and dead. Among the many things he reacted against was the lack of personality in the work of his competitors. Kirby’s response, not unlike the surrealists, was to introduce character. When asked why he had painted the Venus de Milo with, of all things, drawers, for example, Salvador Dali, in his famous Playboy interview, slyly responded that he did so because he wanted his Venus to have interiority. At issue was the modern response to classical prejudice. Kirby was, likewise, reacting to two-dimensional classical psychology. His characters, good or bad, were going to struggle with their demons, especially the bad guys. Take Dr. Doom. In Kirby’s own words: “Dr. Doom is a paranoid. He thinks he’s ugly and he wants the whole world to be like him. Dr. Doom is the fox who had his tail cut off, and he’s trying to talk the whole world into having their tails cut off so when everyone has his tail cut off, he becomes the most handsome fox. That’s ridiculous, because paranoids are insane people who never get their way.” He adds, “Hitler tried it, you know.” Of course, Panter, as a fellow artist, was reacting to the drawings themselves. When Panter first saw them, he explained, he dismissed the style as nothing more than “melting wax”. Many of us would have stopped there more than happy with Kirby’s liquid form. Panter, however, didn’t mean it as a compliment. As a fellow artist, Panter meant it as a mild rebuke, like there was something kind’a corny about Kirby’s style, even for a stoner. At first he just saw it as “melted wax”, Panter said… but, then, and here is where the insight of a peer is always revelatory, he conceded that he realized the drawings had “gravity”! There’s probably no way of describing Kirby without taking into consideration the combination of the psychological element he brings to bear and his drawing style, the way they work together to convey an insight about our cultural condition without losing sight of the physical reality of the universe. Chariots of the Gods (1972) has a similar effect. So much of the argument proposed in this pseudo-documentary is based on the sheer material impossibility of our most revered cultural monuments. Two main factors account for the better part of the mysteries that surround so many wonders of the world. The weight and size of many of these monuments, whether on Easter Island, or those in the swamps of Central America, etc., seemingly make them impossible for primitive humans to have moved. The other physical factor is the precision of much of the stonework, practically inconceivable, even by contemporary standards. For the skeptic it is a relief of sorts that Harald Reinl also directed Castle of the Living Dead (1967), memorable for, among many other things, the forest sequence in which severed body parts hang from the trees. Nevertheless, much of the evidence in Chariots of the Gods is hard, if not impossible, to ignore. Oddly, given the present atmosphere, Iraq, uniquely, comes up in the documentary twice. Two of the main exhibits Reinl returns to are the original tablets of the Gilgamesh and a primitive electric battery. There are those, Reinl among them, who believe that the Gilgamesh contains information that describes, if taken literally, extraterrestrial life, while the battery obviously presupposes the occidental invention by a couple of thousand years, at least. There’s probably no real reason to point out that Iraq is the country “between the rivers” which makes it the most likely geographic location of Eden. Among the many stories to go untold was the sacking of the Iraqi museums. Where these relics have ended up is, at this point, anybody’s guess. As the neo-Crusades rage on, Reinl’s speculation takes on creepy geopolitical overtones. When one considers Kirby’s description of Dr. Doom’s mental profile ––that of the paranoiac inferior psychology-race-culture that tries to assert itself by making everything else as ugly as itself––some disquieting questions that would have here-to-fore been unthinkable are raised: Is the war on Iraq, besides the obvious US oil interest, also, even if only in part, being driven by Christo-fascist cultural interests which seek to assert themselves, ala the Kirby profile of the villain, by destroying any and all evidence of the superiority of prior / other civilizations?