Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Episode One – The Giant Vacuum Cleaner
Launch 17 November
Reviewed by: Phillip Marsden
Comics are undoubtedly gaining momentum in contemporary visual arts practice. Artists who’ve recently engaged with the format include Nick Waplington, Rachel Cattle and Olivia Plender, and others such as Mark Leckey have referenced comics in other media. An event like the Robert Crumb retrospective at Whitechapel last summer also lends weight to the medium. That said a great advantage of comics (along with artists’ books, zines, etc) is their ease of dissemination and subsequent non-reliance on the gallery structure. Daniel Baker has self-published Donkey Head, a comic book, as the central component of an ongoing body of work. Envisaged as “William Blake does Tintin”, it not only adopts the ‘clear line’ style pioneered by Hergé in his Tintin comics, but also points to the mysticism of Blake’s (largely self-published) works.
George, a donkey-headed man, leads Eric, a “young, naïve, Smiths-obsessed teenager” on a somnambulist’s journey through deserted streets to an empty supermarket. Here they encounter the giant vacuum cleaner of this first episode’s title and are sucked into its bowels where the adventure will begin proper.
Running parallel to this at the foot of the page (like Tony Millionaire’s syndicated daily strip Maakies, but with greater relevance to the main plot) is another narrative concerning Eric’s youth and the disappearance of his father. This first installment then serves not only to introduce the main characters but also to imbue a sense of unease that will permeate throughout. Along with Blake, cultural influences that inform the continued work include Dante, Jonathan Swift and even David Lynch (Lynch, though best known for his surreal cinematic endeavors, is also the creator of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World). Another influence, visually, would appear to be Marcel Dzama, who also takes inspiration from Dante. Both convincingly portray the fragility of human characters having embarked, like Tintin (and indeed comics in the contemporary art world), on an adventure into the unknown.
Writer detail:
Philip Marsden
Venue detail:
DONKEY HEAD
, London
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