The Lives of Charles M. Schulz

This is a Love Letter: Personal Correspondences from Charles M. Schulz, which spans art, artifact, and ephemera, is unlike any other show I have seen at Space 1026. The title explains the basic premise, but more on that later. It also brought out a more age-diverse crowd than any Space 1026 opening I have witnessed, no doubt due to the interest in Schulz and his Peanuts gang. It was an affirming feeling to see young and old enthralled by these letters. At a moment when omnipresent media force-feeds us predigested junk at a hysterical rate, a character like Charlie Brown can still be a reliable and satisfying staple. There is something incredibly centering about taking delight in these classic characters; for me, it elicits memories of my grandmother, and her love of Snoopy in the funny papers.



At face value, the letters tell the rise and fall of Schulz’s (or “Sparky,” as he was known to all) love for a young woman named Tracey Claudius in the early 1970s, who was a Philadelphia resident. His prose is romantic to the core, unabashed in letting emotion overflow as he writes repeatedly about his unquenchable and constant desire to see, speak, and be with her. Superlatives abound: his love for her is the strongest and she is by far the greatest. Doodles of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, as well as other one-off characters not among the Peanuts, punctuate some of the letters. Any woman would feel elated to be on the receiving end of such tenderness and constant attention.



But hidden in plain sight, the letters offer a far twistier story. The collection is effectively presented as is, without much curatorial guidance. A crucial detail goes unspoken: that Schulz carried on his affair with Claudius while he was still married to his first wife (source.) In a telling passage, he writes of “following Gatsby’s green light.” The connotation, taken in context with the rest of that particular letter, would seem to be that Schulz is simply a hopeless romantic; however, comparing himself to the doomed Gatsby, with his unrequited love for Daisy, does not foretell good things to come. If anything, Schulz was something like shades of Jay Gatsby (to his lover and as a cartoonist) and Tom Buchanan (to his wife and others) rolled into one.



Where Charlie Brown and Snoopy pop up in the letters, they act as stand-ins for Schulz’s fragmented psyche, the different parts of an outward persona that he had cultivated. Charlie Brown still plays the loveable loser, blissfully living in the moment and unbothered by worries of a love affair that can have no future. Snoopy, on the other hand, is roguish and consciously detached; the iconic Snoopy alter ego “Joe Cool” appears in a sketch placed near a photo of a smiling Schulz talking on the phone. Who was the real “Sparky”? Both elements, the starry-eyed lover and the smooth playboy, persist in the letters.





Does Schulz’s flawed personal life besmirch Peanuts? Of course not. Attempting to understand him adds depth to his already staggering oeuvre. In coming up with ideas for a daily strip that ran for fifty years, correlation between the man and his art was inevitable, for we write (and draw) what we know. If Peanuts ever seemed uncomplicated, there was so much more bubbling beneath the surface than we ever perceived.

First Friday, October 2010

Life? It’s a little crazy right now. But I had to make time for First Friday, especially after missing out on September. I concentrated around Chinatown, stopping first at Jolie Laide Gallery, which I had wanted to visit since it opened over the summer. The location is slightly hidden in an isolated pocket of North Juniper Street, which is fenced in by the new convention center extension to the south and Vine Street to the North. Their current show features three artists: Mike Andrews, Easton Miller, and Andrew Holmquist. Taken as a whole, I was most interested in the varying textures that each of them created. Miller’s collages of repurposed items, such as woven strips of basketball, rabbit’s foot key chains, pieces of shag carpeting, and plaid paper, are like rebuses to unlock some dramatic narrative. The droopy clumps of yarn in Andrew’s tapestries hang as though they are melting off the weft, somehow calling to mind Mike Kelley’s stitched-together stuffed animals. Holmquist’s semi-transparent layers of paint make for an illusion of physical depth.























Marginal Utility had a show of Justin Matherly, featuring the mouthful of a title Would that You were the last of the filth which You had to remove / why does your flesh shit? The most striking work is his degenerated reimagining of the Vatican Museum’s Belvedere Torso, a Classical marble sculpture that served as a font of inspiration for numerous High Renaissance artists. The cement Matherly used for the piece looks like liquefied clay poured into bulging plastic trash bags, which were then left to harden in the sun. Whereas the Belvedere Torso is effortlessly vigorous and virile, Matherly offers a leaden, crippled, and impotent sub-human being. Is it a critique of Classicism’s legacy in figurative art? I do not know, and would perhaps rather it remain ambiguous. But I say all this as an admirer of the work. I did ask Matherly about his technique for making the prints that were also part of the show. He divides the image into sections that are inkjet printed on the glossy side of a transparency, which he then transfers while wet on to the paper surface. The result is a fuzzy and off-register composition that resembles the degradation of an image when it has been re-photographed multiple times.











At Grizzly Grizzly, Christopher Carroll’s The Pilot’s Dilemma pitted man against nature in several short videos. There is a brief loop played in forward and then reverse of a Canada Goose flopping back and forth over a decoy: is it balletic or bellicose? Boston’s Prudential Tower stands in the background, letting us know that we are not in the wild. In a video diptych, a man in waders ventures with trepidation into an arched tunnel, lighting a flare that briefly illuminates the dark interior, but that quickly burns out. Another pair of videos show deer being hit by bullets; the footage is grainy and slowed down, a Zapruder film of hunting, allowing the blood spray and shockwaves that ripple the animals’ flesh to be visible.













Vox Populi was showing four artists. The first you encounter is Kate Stewart’s Götterdämmerung, where plants and sod have been installed in the gallery. The cold, raking light sets an eerie tone. You feel like an unwelcome interloper in the room, as though this is a snapshot of a post-human dimension. Next, there is Kara Crombie’s animated film Mother’s Birthday, a silly, mixed-up anachronism of life on a southern plantation during the Civil War. Think of a nothing-sacred, animated sitcom variation on Gone With The Wind: the lady of the house takes a female slave as lesbian consort; tragicomic mishaps and gags ensue. Leah Bailis’ Magical Thinking is also cinematic in its vision, embellished with sparkling tesserae of a disco ball and a tapestry of sequins. In the back, there is Bill Thelen’s Connect Up To Me. Have you ever said to yourself, I would love to see that notorious paparazzi photo of Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, naked and tied to his steering wheel, but blown-up on a sandwich board, and contextualized by some other stuff? Well, here you go.



























Upstairs at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, I found queasy intrigue in Matthew Sepielli’s paintings of built-up impasto embedded with found object. They are glazed to an almost sticky, sickeningly-sweet finish.











Space 1026’s exhibition featured photography shot on old-school cameras with 35mm film (imagine that!). Sandy Kim’s style is more spontaneous, like the slice of grungy life work by Larry Clark or Nan Goldin, where the artist’s real-life friends, acquaintances, hook-ups, drug-buddies, or whomever else, become the cast of characters. Logan White’s photographs are more elaborately staged, but still feel like they are coated in a layer of bohemian grime.













My night ended on a low-note with a visit to the Fabric Workshop and Museum for Joan Jonas’ Reading Dante III. When I walked into the gallery, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I was nagged for a while by the sense that I had seen this before; then I remembered William Kentridge’s 7 Fragments for Georges Melies at MoMA this spring.



Alright, they are not the same thing, but they feel remarkably similar. I went into this knowing nothing about Jonas. If sources are to be believed, she is an influential but somewhat unsung pioneer of video art. However, I saw nothing in content or presentation of Reading Dante III that felt fresh, original, or demanding of my attention. It is hard to believe that brain behind FWM, who last year, in a very forward-thinking mode decided to partially-fund and exhibit Ryan Trecartin’s most recent film trilogy, is the same person who decided it would be good to reach backward for Jonas. Hold up the twitchy, youthful energy of Trecartin’s films next to Jonas, and she seems not mature, but rather geriatric. Also, it appears that the whole show has been lifted and reinstalled wholesale from the 2009 Venice Biennale (even then subsequently shown in identical form at her gallery Yvon Lambert), an unpardonable act of laziness. Why does an organization with a stated mission of collaborating with artists on new work that pushes the boundaries of materials and media resort to being a showcase for New York gallery hand-me-downs? I know the answer, but will let you draw your own conclusions.