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Ben Katchor at the Jewish Museum - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, July, 2002 by Jason Rosenfeld
The work of Ben Katchor, a comic-strip artist who has received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, has been featured in various publications including New York Press, the Forward, Metropolis and the New Yorker, and has been collected in the Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer books and The Jew of New York. This, his first museum exhibition, presented his strips in every step of their production, from typed marked-up scripts, to large-scale ink underdrawings, to reduced photocopies overlaid with watercolors and lettered for reproduction. The display of over 160 works revealed the beauty of the original black-and-white and, more recently, color washes; the subtlety of tones and hues is often lost in reproduction.
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Katchor's Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn seeps into his works through the mood, pace and weight of the narrative, and in the Yiddish-derived, mid-20th-century language and signage that fill the panels. Katchor's characters inhabit the modern world but are imaginative evocations of his father's generation; they are working-class, urban archeologists whose eyes linger on the degraded and the nostalgic instead of the pristine and the contemporary. In this New York-like city, each citizen has some particular esoteric knowledge to share, conveying the value and dizzying heterogeneity of human interaction in urban centers. Recent strips, such as Hotel and Farm, have expanded this theme to the interdependence of country and city.
Unfortunately, most writings on Katchor emphasize literary and anecdotal content over artistry. Few artists have so capitalized on the innate expressive ness of an unsteady line. Katchor's irresolute style is commensurate with his celebrations of the vagaries of city life and the theme of historical slippage, animating a world of shuffling figures and vertiginous cityscapes. In a culture still wary of perceiving comics as fine art, despite general appreciation of the likes of Art Spiegelman and Daniel Clowes, Katchor's work remains little known. However, its prosaic yet metaphysical view of urban existence recalls works of modern and contemporary art and literature by Eugene Atget, Kurt Schwitters, E.L. Doctorow, et al., and brilliantly reveals this medium's visual and narrative potential.
The exhibition included vitrines containing Katchor's collections of ephemera ("cheap novelties" as he calls them), re-creations of objects from his stories, video projections and animated visuals from an Obie Award-winning comic-book opera he collaborated on, The Carbon Copy Building. A documentary on the artist was continuously screened.
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