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Jason Little, the cartoonist who created the great strip "Bee," has organized a kind of walk-in, multi-artist, multilayered, po-mo graphic-novel installation piece that one reads panel by panel while moving through a labyrinthine exhibition space. It's called Cartünnel: a comix fluxture:
Visitors are invited to walk through the maze and experience a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, with side-plots, dead-ends, and parallel narrative universes, created in a collaborative atmosphere. Depending on which directions visitors choose at various junctures along the way, the course of the story will be altered accordingly. A visitor would be able to walk through the maze several times and see different versions and permutations of the narrative each time they do.I haven't seen the installation yet (at Flux Factory in Queens, Saturdays and Sundays 2-8 pm through August 7) but I enjoyed paging through Little's panels online (go to the thumbnail grid, or even better, follow them sequentially here by clicking the right arrows above each panel). Not all of the show looks this strong (and the mounting of drawings appears awfully crude) but I'll say more after I...um, see it. All the artists are doing variations on a mutually agreed-upon story and characters: a cute Cambodian girl loses her leg to a landmine, moves to America with her parents, then discovers a magic goose in Central Park. The bird is the familiar of a witch lady, a naked hag in a wolf skin cursed to live forever in the park, who periodically morphs into a curvaceous babe and seduces joggers. Just as he did with Bee (whose adventures are assembled in the book Shutterbug Follies), Little makes creeped-out subject matter seem beguiling and "normal" through his clean, lucid, and enormously sympathetic drawing style. His panels are for sale, and a portion goes to the not-for-profit space--I acquired two (including the winsome one above), in a shameless display of Greenbergesque blogospheric power-broking.
"The pale surrogate humans of Michelle Handelman's performance work Passerby infiltrated Bryant Park today, mingling with the late lunch crowd." That was supposed to be the opening sentence of this post. I just noticed the "the" in "the late lunch crowd" was missing through my own sloppiness. It's fixed now. If anyone spots a typo here, or something you think is a typo, please leave a comment. You won't hurt my feelings; in fact I'll send you a no-prize (Marvel comics reference) by email.
This still needs some work, continuity-wise, but you get the idea. I notice New York Times columnist Frank Rich actually felt it was worth drawing some sociological conclusions from the fact that Spider Man 2 eclipsed Fahrenheit 9/11 at the box office. (America needs a hero that's concerned about the collateral damage he causes, yada yada yada.) Is anyone else as tired of Rich's schtick as I am? Read a week's worth of newspaper articles, tie them all together with the entertainment angle: it's Playdoh factory crit.