FUKT /by Lars Bang Larsen

The North’s tradition for unhinged artistic genius - like the 19th century painter C.F. Hill who, after he went mad, only drew - has fizzled out in the sedate realm of modern Scandinavia. The maniacs and visionaries aren’t what they used to be. As it has been noted, the North is characterised by being a bedroom culture, withdrawn and individual in its suburban hideaways, as opposed to the more communal open-air cultures of the South. Maybe there is a closer proximity than we think between the bedroom and the asylum?

In fact, the resonance between Fukt’s compilation of bedroom draughtsmen and -women, and C. F. Hill’s artistic and mental journey seems to suggest so. After a few years of plein-air painting in the French countryside, something snapped in the mind of the young artist, and they took him home to Lund. He continued to sketch out his fantasies that remained unconnected to rationality for the rest of his life: obsessive duplications of his own signature, patterns meandering in and out of figuration, and squirting genitals floating as huge, ominous rubber animals in tenebrous archipelagos with log cabins and sickly-looking fir trees. Did he use the drawings to fend off the mind-ghosts, or to travel further into them?

This isn’t to suggest that the Fukt draughtsmen are crazy. But from Hill to the grand old man of underground comics, Robert Crumb, there is a connection between drawing and being fucked up. If you push the introvert properties of working on the same piece of paper for a big chunk of time just a little further, you have mental leverage in the rapport to the spectator... line by line, frame by frame, for better or worse. It isn’t for nothing that loneliness in some form or other seems to be an undercurrent in this volume of Fukt. ‘...I might be the only one in the world able to recall both the way in and the way out...’ it says in the prologue of Crystal City. Both C.F. Hill and Spiderman could have endorsed that.

Nothing in adult life quite corresponds to the intense feeling of perfect secluded happiness, when you as a child would sink down in a sack chair in the public library and mine a pile of comic books. However, underground artists from the tribe around Sture and Ann-Charlotte Johannesson’s psychedelic Cannabis Gallery in the late 60s Malmö probably had the production and consumption of drawing down to the same womb-like bliss: here, the local underground posse would hang out and work on collective, colourful free-form pieces, undisturbed and high apart from the occasional police raid for obscene material.

Their common project was dubbed, as a homage to James Bond, Agent Knallrup med rätt att knuffas (Agent Browbeat - Licence to Push and Shove). The Malmö police drug squad had a problem: They knew that somebody somewhere was feeling good illegally. Agent Browbeat was a paranoid policeman who went from being a ‘real’ detective with the task of solving ‘real’ crimes to infiltrate the hippie circles; instead of dangerous criminals he had to arrest happy youths. What a bummer for the poor agent! But for once, drawing wasn’t a solitary activity.

In the work of another psychedelic artist, Öyvind Fahlström’s, Mike Kelley sees a successful realisation of a brand of pop art with a political resonance. Like cartoon artists, Fahlström introduced into his work a gestural manner all his own, and thereby called into question the pictorial convention of ‘authorlessness’ - a convention that Kelley sees as essentially class-based and seeks to prolong the useless distinction between so-called “low” and “high” art. Cartoons was a way to stay forever young for pop art:

“What else could explain the fact that in the fine-art world Lichtenstein is considered the sole author of images lifted with only minimal changes from other artists? To people familiar with comic book illustrators, the images that Lichtenstein quotes are immediately recognizable as the work of specific cartoonists. But to the general viewer, this kind of image is read as the sign of “cartoons” in general and this is synonymous with the “low”, with the reading habits of children or the illiterate lower classes. To the upper class viewer, a cartoon symbolizes the indifferentiated mass mind of the working classes.” *

In most other media that once in their avant-gardist past killed off the modernist idea of the artist (like Conceptual art or early video art), the Author sooner or later came home to roost - if not via institutional appropriation, then through the predictable needs of the art market. But in cartoons the Author never rose to become a universal hero in the first place, and hence there was never any need for his or her death. From this point of view, drawing still seems like a fresh exploration of signature styles, and a direct means of bypassing studio practice, technology, galleries, curators and institutions. The cartoonist or draughtsman may be slightly batty, but at least s/he has been left alone by art world ideologies.
Drawing is tracing the minute cracks in the real to open the front line between the individual mind and the world. Reading cartoons is being alone while knowing that you are part of an invisible community of peers who peek over the top of the comic book in the same disturbed manner as yourself.

Don’t be afraid, come closer. You are one of us.

Lars Bang Larsen

 

* Mike Kelley: Myth Science. In: Öyvind Fahlström:. The Complete Graphics, Multiples and Sound Works.
Exhibition catalogue, Bawag Foundation, Vienna 2001, p. 16.