All the Blog Entries..., Part Two: Ironic Subtitle

There's simply not enough time left for anyone to capitalize on it, but if anyone's in Vancouver between now and 8 September, stop by the Vancouver Art Gallery for the last days of the "Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art" exhibit.

Were this a traditional review, there'd be some sort of ironic title like "Museums Have Grown Up and Accept Comics" or "Otaku Kids: On to the Opera!" or something like that, but this will be mostly anecdotal. If you want lots of details, get hold of the exhibit book. (I'll order it in a day or two when I send off for Anathem.)

Krazy! takes over the first two floors of the Art Gallery. I'd never been there before - so I can't compare to previous installations - but I made a point of getting to this show twice this summer. The general direction for the show seemed to be counterclockwise on the first floor, taking you from comics to graphic novels to manga to anime to cartoons. The second floor, clockwise in orientation (unless you tend to visit the gift shop in the middle of your tour), went from video games to the theatre to pop art to CGI art to conceptual art (to the gift shop).

Each section featured about eight artists, with several pages or images apiece. Presentation was spare and simple - lots of white walls, plain wood, and extra 3D elements added to the mix like maquettes and cardboard models of settings - though some sections had more to offer than others. For example, the comics and graphic novels were entirely English language, while the manga did not feature translations, but anime, thank goodness, had subtitles.

The most disappointing section was probably video games. It's not that the selections were bad - it's hard to argue with most of the selections that had been released - but that some of the choices were odd. Most notable was the choice to include Spore. Part of this may have been that Will Wright, the creator of Spore, The Sims, and most anything else with Sim in the title, was the curator for the video games section - which, admittedly, didn`t keep Seth or Spiegelman from including their own works in the comic and graphic novel sections - but the main source of annoyance is that the game isn`t even out yet and it`s already featured in the show. The other issue with this section was the layout - screenshots and video were shown on televisions set on short stands in the middle of the floor - while the walls had some game boxes, consoles, and a wall of screenshots. When compared to the anime section, which featured angled projections on white walls and LCDs playing key clips from a series of films - a thoroughly effective and hypnotic section - the video games were quite disappointing. (And you couldn't buy them in the gift shop, though you couldn't buy the anime, either.)

There were many notable sections and sequences for the exhibition. I was deeply taken by Kevin Huizenga's "Jeepers Jacobs" in the comics, and Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons was quite impressive, too. I'll need to get hold of several anime films now, such as Paprika, Patlabor 2, and The Place Promised in Our Early Days. (Oh, and Akira again. It always comes back Akira, doesn't it?) I'd like to try some of the manga that was featured, though it's tough to figure what to make of some. Afro Samurai didn't look too bad, but I'm not sure what to make of the super-kawaii (but hyper-sexualized) Pure Trance. And it would be neat to see all of Cosplayers, with its striking mix of supermodern Chinese urbanity and people running around in full fandom costumes.

Two pieces particularly stand out in my memory, though. One was a massive statue by Mr. (seriously, Mr.) called Strawberry Voice. The statue was a cartoon girl's head, roughly 3 to 4 metres tall, with a face of sunny details and vague distance and a cave entered from the nape of the skull filled with decades of girls' toys, shiny objects, and a ceiling of country-style quilting. This sounds much simpler than it is. The effect, I suppose, was akin to seeing the monumental Lawren Harris at the McMichael a few years ago: you encounter something iconic and realize that there's something to the icon, rather than just a shorthand. Strawberry Voice was as similar an experience as monumental theosophist art compared to pop-culture suffused statuary can be. I realize that's an awfully mixed metaphor, but it's art - if I could nail it down and quantify it with joyless, pinpoint precision, I'd likely be shilling for some major brand.

The other - my favourite, for reasons I still can't coalesce - was No Ghost Just a Shell by Angela Bulloch and Imke Wagener. It was a multimedia sort of an art piece, and I'll have to read more on it later. [Having breezed through some of the link above, I'm kinda right and kinda wrong.] Essentially, it is a presentation of a metaphysical, self-aware computer generator character... I think. A small theatre offered a spooling presentation of a four minute clip, possibly from a larger piece, where this figure discussed something either philosophical or pretentious (or both) with an internal monologue conducted at a rapid, hypersaturatedliterate clip. The only sounds "made" by this figure were clicks and gasps which made it seem less and less human, made the viewer face the uncanny valley of computer representation rather than be taken by the figure and accept it as a humane figure. I still can't quite say what it's about. I can't even quite say if it was successful. I can say that it was compelling, though, and that it enthralled me.

I'm sure that this show may have annoyed some - there were far more bad words and bits of nudity than the slightest mention of superheroes, and the detailed examination of Over the Hedge, particularly as the example of the state-of-the-art for cartooning, was odd - but the overall effect was very strong. I wish I could see it again.