Known as the father of punk comics for the much-fetishized, album covers, illustrations and comic books he has been creating since the ’70s, Gary Panter’s Rozz Tox Manifesto was an influential screed against artists who think defying the system is the only way to go. Panter promoted the idea that decrying “sell-outs” was a cop out, saying, “Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim.” This philosophy allowed him the credence to work as the set designer for ’80s children’s show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” which propelled him further into the public eye. Panter works on myriad projects, including light shows with legendary light artist Joshua White, and keeps up an ever-prolific output of books, toys, shoes, gallery shows and art objects. A giant anthology of Panter’s works was recently published by PictureBox, Inc. On this panel, his counterpart, C.F.––otherwise known as Chris Forgues––is a Providence, Rhode Island-based artist and musician, whose magical Powr Mastrs comic series (also published by PictureBox) and noise project “Kites” have garnered him attention in both the music and comics worlds. PictureBox Publisher Dan Nadel also sits in to ask Panter a few questions.
I’m Dan Nadel, the publisher of PictureBox. I’m very pleased to have C.F. and Gary Panter here with us today. C.F. is the author of Powr Mastrs, a continuing series of graphic novels, the second of which will be out in a couple months, and also goes by the moniker Kites as a musical performer. Gary Panter is the author of numerous comics and many, many paintings, and was also the lead production designer of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
C.F.: What do you think of appropriated images now, in 2008? Is it still observational drawing? I know that a lot of paintings that you made for a while were just from things [you found] around your neighborhood. So maybe it’s a different kind of life drawing?
Gary Panter: Yeah, I guess I’m trying to do a landscape now, and so it’s all this detritus of human activity, fragments of things, some characters and how we despoil the landscape. It’s also trying to be a hieroglyph: you come to Earth, you look around for the interesting stuff, and you try to say stuff with the interesting stuff, or the boring stuff, or the bad stuff or whatever.
A lot of artists in the late ’70s and ’80s turned to appropriation, like Richard Prince, to make a pictorial punch line. That’s something you never did, and I wondered why you’re continuing to use found imagery, not just sort of as itself, but as a language to tell stories?
GP: Richard Prince re-contextualizes—you take something from one place and you put it somewhere else and it seems clearer. I imagine Richard’s probably excited about the stuff he’s making art about, and I am, too. Maybe it’s not that different, maybe it just looks different, because I’m slobbier or something.
C.F.: I was thinking about the drawings of Waco, Texas and the drawing from 9/11. I don’t just like making art or doing any creative action. It is about asking questions about things that are hard to understand.
GP: The New Yorker sent me to Waco to cover the Branch Davidian shootout twelve days after, and I’m not a reporter or a brave person. But I’m a Texan, so I could go there and kind of bumble around and ask people questions and find things out. That’s what those drawings were about. And 9/11, I had a studio in Williamsburg, and when the planes hit the building, I went on the roof and it was all too visible. I went downstairs and got my book and started drawing the scene, which was horrible. But usually, the stuff I’m drawing is not such a horrible bummer as the Branch Davidian shootout and the World Trade Center falling down.
C.F.: I wanted to ask you about naming things. A lot of your drawings and paintings [have] titles [that] sometimes seem arbitrary, and sometimes they seem really specific. [For the] sketchbook Weekly Best Selling Item, you took a list of best selling items and then for every item you would do a drawing. And I think of naming in terms of mythology: if you know something’s name, you have power over it or you can control it [like] in the story Rumpelstiltskin. In the Taoist tradition, there’s like a great void, a nothingness, and once you start naming things, you divide the 10,000 things that create the world of man.
GP: It’s part of drawing. If you look at Ed Ruscha paintings, they’re really short poems. So you have the potential to do that when naming something, and a lot of times, there’s this lame-ass shamanistic thing going on where I’ll do a drawing and then I’ll look around the room for the name of the drawing, or I’ll go open a book and look for the name of the drawing. Or on that Weekly Best Selling Item list: there were not correlations between the next drawing; I did the next drawing, and then I went and looked at the list to find out what the name of the drawing would be. That would give some kind of random information, so I’m overlaying systems. Maybe it’s looking for patterns where there are none. It’s definitely looking for generating associations, and for me it’s important if I can generate associations, because I can follow those associations. And naming, it’s a primitive power, sorting things out.
C.F.: Do you hold onto those [associations]? Do you look at older drawings that you’ve done, and is there a unit of understanding that you hold onto into the future? Is there some kind of seed that stays with you?
GP: Yeah, it leads to more ideas. In painting, I’m pretty formal. It looks silly and it looks random, but they’re pretty formal paintings, and so the typical kind of things are working in series—letting something mutate, letting something grow, seeing what follows the next thing. So, yeah, each one is a seed for the next one. Like I’ve said too many times, back when I was in high school and Saturday came around, it drove me crazy and I didn’t know what to do with my self, you know? Like suddenly here’s the day when you’re not in school and you can do whatever you want. I would freak out, but the more I kept sketchbooks and the more I started making art, I didn’t have time to sit around being bored and freaked out. I’d have ideas to follow. It’s good to not be freaking out on Saturdays anymore, unless I have a horrible commercial job—like right now—and I’m trying to get it over with. Almost done with it.
[To Panter] Your sketchbooks comprise a massive body of work. There are paintings and comics and graphics and set design and music. It seems like you treat every drawing as though it was the most important drawing, whether it’s private or public. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the difference between private and public drawing, because, after all, there are tens of thousands of images that nobody’s ever seen that are just in your books, but they are as complete as the paintings that people do see.
GP: Yeah, I mean there are all kinds of drawings. There are drawings where I’m highly aware, there are drawings [I made] where I’m nearly asleep, [or] with my eyes closed. You look at a lot of people’s sketchbooks, and it’s a picture of a pretty girl’s head. You turn the page, and it’s eight more of those, and maybe how the clothing falls [is different], and they’re working on [the idea]. You don’t really have to see those drawings. And it’s the same way with my drawings too, but I kind of avoided for years doing those rote drawings, but now I decided I need to do those rote drawings to get better at what I do. So, a lot [are] not meant to be seen.
C.F.: You said in your comics that you don’t like to have anything too bad happen to the characters, and you don’t want the bad guys to be too bad. Also, you said that you don’t like to deal with men and women relationships too much, and all of these things you didn’t want to deal with because they are dangerous. So I wanted to know what do you mean by dangerous.
GP: They’re shutting down my storytelling, unfortunately. If you can’t write about sexual conflict, you’re screwed as a writer. Basically, that’s mostly what people are writing about in the world. But it’s too dangerous, because then someone’s going to think it’s about them.
C.F.: What about the badness?
GP: That’s another problem. You can’t write good stories without villains. You can write stories about someone cutting a loaf of bread. Sit at the table, cut bread. That’s safe. But, if I don’t want my characters to do bad things, then nothing much is going to happen. So, I invented one bad character but he’s only acting, he comes in and acts the bad parts in my stories, then he goes home and he’s nice.
Why can’t the characters be bad?
GP: I don’t know. I’m lame and crazy…
C.F.: It seems like in your paintings you touch upon things like sex or dark things, but in comics you don’t do that at all. Is it because it’s a story, or because of the history of comics as a children’s medium, or some subconscious melding of those things? What is that reluctance?
GP: I don’t know, arrested development or something. When I’m really old, I’ll do really horrible sexual comics that are insightful and revealing, that will reveal everything I know about men and women. But I’m not ready yet. People are like prairie dogs with long arms. I’m not very excited about their sex lives very much. They go down in the hole, and they do that underground in the holes. I would have to go down there. I could flush them out with a water hose and have a look.
C.F.: In a lot of your paintings, there’s a lot of architectural fascination. Some of it is strict and modernist, just squares and stuff. These architectural models that you’ve made of some of them also have that same vibe, and the way that they’re built is from crude materials or common materials, in the same way that drawings don’t require a lot. You don’t need a budget to make a drawing. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit, that difference between a mark and a line, and how that relates to this idea of a building that you’d be inside of something that was created out of marks like that. Like this building that we’re in, for instance.
GP: I don’t know that there’s really a difference, but lines might delineate something. If you’re drawing a picture of [this building], then you would draw vertical lines for the columns and things would be outlined, but the mark itself is the character of the mark making. In a Cy Twombly drawing, what he marks is interesting, but the character of the drawing is interesting, too. I could do a drawing of this room in a million different ways, but the lines would be delineating the form, and the mark would have character or not.
These buildings I make are just part of my whole infantile regression. I’m trying to run away into these buildings, because it’s too crowded in Brooklyn––I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll buy some land in Pennsylvania, and I’ll build a dome. But, oh no, my neighbors won’t like it, so I’ll have to build a fence around it. So then I start building a model fence or an underground house or, gee, how would I have power out there, I better save all of the pig shit and get it generating gas, and then I can cook. I can’t do that. I can’t really afford a Quonset hut. I’d like to, I like Quonset huts. I hear the US government is building a whole bunch of them over in the Middle East to imprison people in. I’d like to go live in those for a while. It’s a fantasy, the fantasy of a million different versions. The comic strips are a fantasy about the lives of these characters. The architecture is either: a place for my characters to live in the stories, or artifacts of human activity for landscape paintings, or they’re really a fantasy about something I could build. My father builds houses and he’s a contractor. He builds one house at a time. He’s an old guy now, but it’s fascinating to me that he can do that.
Audience: Gary, you had a show recently at the Clementine Gallery where you did a chalk drawing on the wall. In the chalk drawing, you used a lot of symbols. When you guys spoke at the Strand on Tuesday that same week, you [said you] were creating your own language of mythology by using these unconscious symbols to communicate your own experience.
GP: I don’t really want to be possessed by demons or anything like that, but I do like to be open. I think if you open your mind and let things in, things that are meaningful will come in. I feel like we’re connected somehow. We do seem to be mysteriously connected and all of the symbols you were talking about, a lot of them are very primary forms. [It’s like] the Buckminster Fuller thing of putting seven pencils in a group. I’m really interested in how things group together, how things stack. I’m not mathematical, but I can play around with corks and toothpicks and rubber bands and make little polyhedronal models. It seems pointless and crazy, but I learn a lot from it about how things fit together. I am very interested in art and art history, so a lot of those motifs are coming out of every kind of culture that I’m finding. And where they repeat. And I’m probably closer to Jung than Freud I guess in a way.
If you’re looking for underlying structures, you can find them. That’s one thing I’m looking for. I’m a generalist; I can see big, simple patterns. I don’t know if they’re really there or not, I didn’t study statistics, but that’s one thing I can usually do: reduce something down to something very simple. And people have mentioned that to me so it must be an asset. Most people’s art is a lot more complicated, in a way.
Audience: Yours is complicated in the sense that there’s a common notion about you, that you’ve invented a certain pictorial language that you’re able to form sentences. I think you’ve talked about this yourself. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, creating image sentences about all of your different letters and words.
GP: Associations arise out of any image you put next to another image. A bee and a fire helmet—there’s not any correlation, but [the] mind starts trying to find them, trying to find things that are very potent for me, or things that make me feel better, make me feel worse, make me fearful. Just same as words: words have implications and you put them together to speak. In some ways, I’m speaking in the paintings, but I don’t want to say exactly what they’re about, because everyone is bringing their own vocabulary to it.
What’s the association between ladies in a Tijuana hotel room and a dinosaur off a Chinese package? I don’t really have the answer for that. I find images that are potent to me and I use them over and over again in combination. And sometimes a dinosaur means one thing in a painting and sometimes it means something else. Sometimes it’s the competition, sometimes it’s the suitors, sometimes it’s death, and sometimes it’s high energy. It really depends on the context.
C.F.: It seems [that in your book] Jimbo in Purgatory that you’re trying to gather all of this, it seems like an attempt to gather the totality of all of your associations. Jimbo is going through purgatory and he’s seeing all of this culture.
GP: I did a comic book based on Dante’s Purgatory using my punk rock character Jimbo. It was really an experimental procedure in a way. Purgatory is complicated. It was the end of the century and I wanted to do something to commemorate the century. I’m also interested in procedures, and I realized that no one was reading my comic books. ‘Oh, there’s not 40,000 people reading my comic books. Oh, there’s not 20,000 people reading my comics. There’s not 10,000… Well, I’m just going to go nuts for the thousand people that are reading my comics, because I think they would like it and I would like to do it.’ And so I felt enabled in some sense, but it’s too complicated to talk about—it’s procedural, that particular comic book. It was trying to synthesize everything into a big psychedelic nightmare. If I start talking about it, everyone’s going to get bored and leave.
C.F.: Do you feel that the attempt to create a totality out of so many fragments is going to continue to interest you, as you get older? And that maybe, in the way these paintings are attempts over and over again to see how things—you’ll make a codex?
GP: That particular comic book was really [about] superimposing systems and then finding out what resulted from the occurrences. I took Purgatory—I didn’t want to do the whole Divine Comedy—but I had this premise for this comic that Boccaccio’s Decameron was an encoded version and restatement of the cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I don’t think it was true, but it was an interesting premise. I tried to find stories of the Decameron that I thought had some association with cantos and Purgatory, and then I did word counts and grids and broke the things down into panels and words groups. Then [I] looked for concurrent images––so if I could do this for the Decameron and for Purgatory and find a white flag flying in that paragraph, that’s what I was looking for. And so if I find the white flag flying in that group of words, then I would go look for a white flag elsewhere to represent it. That helped me in driving my studies, because this was like a mosaic. It’s not friendly, it’s not an easy comic to read or anything, but it was a procedural comic that would have an output at the end of it, and the output served a lot of processes. It kept me really busy for a long time—for six years.
C.F.: Is there any more work in that vein that you’re planning to do now?
GP: Well I did Jimbo’s Inferno and Jimbo in Purgatory, and I don’t want to do Jimbo Paradise… I [named] a book Adventures in Paradise, which led me to read Dante in the first place. So, I don’t have to do it, except it has a real bummer ending. At the end of Adventures in Paradise, a nuclear weapon has gone off in a city and there’s a dying horse Jimbo has to help kill. So, that would be the end of my Divine Comedy and my “Divine un-Comedy” man. I guess if I tried to approach that again, I’d go to Milton’s Paradise Regained and try to put that into the grid. I don’t want to do a bigger book because that would be stupid. It’s already too big. The second book is way too big. So if I draw a line through the edges, you’d end up with a six-foot tall book. Maybe I’ll do a stack of comics that come in a shoebox you keep under your bed that are all worn out and one of them is Woody Woodpecker and one of them is like Oswald the Rabbit. And there’s Kona….
Audience: When you’re doing a painting, when you don’t really have the same script that you do for a comic, do you find that it ends up a lot different than you initially intended it to be?
GP: Sometimes I do achieve the painting I’m setting out to achieve, because I’m not standing in front of an empty canvas waiting for inspiration anymore. I used to do that. You’d just stand there and suffer for six months with the paintbrush in your hand and then you go, ‘Oh, I know that was it. I’ll have to wait another six months.’ But that just drove me crazy. I’ve done all of these drawings, and then I started using really simple techniques of gridding the drawings up, so if I do a drawing and I know it’s going to be a painting, then that’s settled. It’s really: what form does that drawing take when its re-expressed and what colors might I bring to it? What [are the] associations and what are the particulars of it. In some ways, once the drawing is determined, it’s more abstract, because then I know its generating literary meaning. There are objects in the drawing—I don’t have to think about that. I can just trust that to be going on. Then, I start composing the colors. I’ve been painting for a long time now, so I might achieve the very next painting, but I am also looking down the road 60 paintings from now, what that might be like. One time––because we don’t really live long enough to achieve very much–-I was thinking, ‘What if I got to live for a thousand years, what might my paintings be like?’ I started thinking, ‘Well I do about 20 paintings a year, and they’re usually a little body of work. After a year, I could change it a little bit and it would lead to something. If I was doing horizontal stripes, they might become vertical or they might become diagonal or they might become mirror images. So, I gridded out a thousand years of my progress as a painter, and it was sad. I didn’t really get very far in a thousand years.
Audience: I wonder if you could tell us about how you leverage your commercial career with your more creative, freeform career. What we’ve been talking about now is a lot of your paintings and your sketchbooks and your comics, but do you want to talk about your commercial career at all?
GP: I need money. I wish I was born rich; it would be great. But I got out of art school and I needed to make money. I couldn’t work at McDonald’s, because I don’t know how to make change. I couldn’t be a waiter in a real restaurant, because I can’t remember an order, so I drove around Texas trying to get commercial artwork. It didn’t work, so I moved to LA and I did get commercial artwork. Commercial artwork for me is different from my individual work, because I’m not really the boss of it. Whoever hires me to do work for them, they’re the boss of me at that moment, doing that work, and that’s a big difference. But commercial art has the advantage of being seen by lots of people as opposed to gallery art. That’s kind of interesting in that you can make imagery that permeates the culture, to some extent. It depends on where people are looking for imagery in the culture, but when I was young it was album covers and magazines. That’s where you could find the newest interesting [work] if you were looking for experimental stuff. I felt a sympathy with that, and my commercial art had a similar look to my personal art. But again, you’re really solving someone else’s problem and so you have more responsibility in a way.
When we did “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” it became one of the most important things I ever did, though to me it was a cool job, and we got to do our job and have fun. And it did a lot of things that people wanted to do. Like, the hippies wanted to have their own psychedelic kids show. And the experimental artist would like to make an experimental kids’ show, and we got a chance to do that, and so it went out and infected a whole generation. My paintings, which to me are much more powerful—you know a few people see them and get sick and go away, but I don’t know. Things do have a life sometimes, like the Branch Davidian shootout. I’m not a reporter, but I got sent to Waco and I did some of the best drawings of my life, from being thrust into that situation. It was an accidental thing that happened in my life, and maybe it’s hard to know as an artist if you’re remembered in the least. I mean, what does it matter, because we’re not here anymore.