a review by Mark McKinney (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio)
As
the exhibition's title indicates, visiting Justin Green's Funeral Pyre allows
visitors to celebrate and mourn Justin Green. [FIGS 1 + 2] The artist died
in Cincinnati at age 76 of colon cancer on April 23, 2022, according to his
obituaries in several prominent periodicals, including the Chicago Tribune,
The Comics Journal and The New York Times. Justin Green is
best known for his autobiographical work Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin
Mary, first published by Last Gasp in 1972, and cited by Art Spiegelman as
having inspired him to write Maus. The exhibition's organizers are Carol
Tyler and Julia Green. Tyler, his wife, is an accomplished cartoonist specializing
in biographical and autobiographical comics, and is therefore uniquely
qualified to represent Justin Green's art and life. So is Julia Green, their
daughter, who is both an artist and owner of the gallery hosting the exhibition.
The exhibition allows the visitor to remember Justin Green in tangible ways,
and to celebrate the art he has left behind, both through the content and
structure of the exhibition, and the stories that Tyler and Julia Green tell
about him and his art. Design Collective Gallery is located in Northside, a neighborhood
northwest of downtown Cincinnati that is known for its openness to the arts and
popular music. For example, just a few doors down from the gallery lies a local
landmark store, Shake It Records, which has a large stock of vinyl disks, a
comics section in the basement, signs painted by Justin Green, and original
artwork by him on the walls, especially full-page comic-strip biographies he
drew for Pulse! magazine, published by Tower Records. The Design
Collective Gallery, with its painted graffiti mural on the outside of its north
wall, and this exhibition, fit seamlessly into the neighborhood. The gallery's
front glass windows are decorated with large black-and-white characters from
comics by Justin Green. [FIG 3] The exhibition opened on October 7, 2022
and runs through December 31 of this year, in Design Collective Gallery (4150
Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio). It is open from four o'clock in the afternoon to
seven o'clock in the evening on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, or by appointment).
On entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by Tyler or Julia Green, who kindly
give tours of the exhibition. I visited it on Thursday, December 8, 2022, and
was given one.
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The exhibition
is organized into approximately six sections, organically grouped by themes, but
without a strict chronological progression or complete thematic separation
between them. Two large rooms, each of which contains a section of the
exhibition, are separated by a center wall running most of the building's
length, with an open doorway midway that allows passage between the two. The
long left or north room, the first space when one enters the gallery, is titled
"The Underground," after Justin Green's underground comics. [FIG 4]
Julia Green said that the room contained about one sixteenth, at most, of his
underground comics originals, and that the family owns only three pieces of
that work, because her father had sold, traded, or given away almost all of it.
However, thanks to the generosity of current owners of the original art,
several important pieces are part of the exhibition. Moving clockwise around
the room, beginning at the northwest corner of the building, one first sees the
photograph that helped inspire Green's comics collection Sacred and Profane
[FIG 5] (it is also reproduced on the inside front cover of the book).
Taken by Keith Green, the artist's brother (who died in 1995), it shows a sign
in the form of a saw, advertising a store in San Francisco, seemingly laid across
the lower part of a cross that advertises a different, religiously affiliated,
building, as though the tool were sawing iconoclastically through the symbol of
Christ's crucifixion. [FIG 6] The photograph inspired the artist's work
on the comic book, Julia Green told me. Beginning just to the right of the
photo, and stretching across most of the rest of the north wall, a large painting
of a building borrowed from the front cover and page three of Sacred and
Profane artfully frames reproductions of the pages from all five
installments of "We fellow traveleers" [sic] anthologized in the Last
Gasp book, after serialization in Comix Book, a series published by Marvel
and Kitchen Sink Press. [FIG 7] Librarians at the Billy Ireland Cartoon
Library and Museum, at the Ohio State University, generously scanned the
original art, held in their collection, so that high-quality reproductions of
the pages could be displayed here. At the end of the sequence, in the corner,
is original art from the "Rowdy Noody" page on the back cover of Sacred
and Profane, and related originals, including the front cover illustration
of Comix Book no. 5 (cf. the last panel of "We fellow traveleers:
conclusion," part 5).
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The right-hand
side of the back wall features a large reproduction of the famous frontispiece
drawing of the naked, chained and suspended narrator of Binky Brown Meets
the Holy Virgin Mary. [FIG 8] Visitors are invited to write down a
title from a bibliography that lists Justin Green's comics and post it in the remaining
blank wall space, so that a wall full of Green's titles appears to emerge from
the pen of his tortured self-portrait as Binky Brown. Against the back half of
the room's south wall are a display case and a long, hung frame containing
sketches, letters and notebooks that document Green's art and his relationship
to it. [FIG 9] Among them is a letter in his beautiful calligraphy that he
wrote in1975 to
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Albert L. Morse, the man who had purchased all the original
art from Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) for twelve
dollars per page, amounting to just over five hundred dollars for the forty-two
pages. [FIG 10] In his letter, Green bitterly expresses his belief that
he had been exploited by Morse through the sale, and should receive further
compensation from the buyer for his artwork.[1] The
artist suggests that personal problems, including the state of his mental
health, were factors leading to him accept such a small amount of money for his
autobiography. Julia Green explained to me that her father had sold the art to
Morse in order to be able to pay his rent. Together, these artifacts document Justin
Green's artistic creativity, his struggle to bring his comics-related projects
to fruition, and his conflicted relationship to the sign-painting that he began
in San Francisco, before moving to Cincinnati in 1997 and continuing to work in
that profession. The latter was both a source of autonomy, because it enabled
him to pay his bills, and of frustration, insofar as it prevented him from
working fulltime on other creative projects, such as his comics.[2]
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On the
front half of the same wall hang several pieces of original art by Green: a
page from the "Projunior" series, a casket sculpture, "Zen
time" (two single-page stories, including the one from the inside back
cover of Sacred and Profane), "The graduate" (one page), two Philip
Morris tobacco advertising parodies, and two versions of a Colonel Sanders
parody page published on the inside back cover of Green's Show + Tell Comics.
[FIG 11] Julia Green intentionally positioned the Colonel Sanders parody
pages near the front of the gallery so that when one stands inside the building
looking out through the front window, the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and
its Colonel Sanders sign located just across the street are visible simultaneously
with Green's parodic drawings of the advertising icon. [FIG 12] Although
the drawings, which show a blood-stained Colonel Sanders slaughtering chickens
with an axe, might seem to suggest otherwise, Julia Green said that her father
was not a vegetarian. She also said that he had smoked cigarettes even though
his parodies refer to the deadly effects that smoking can have. The casket
sculpture appears to symbolize part of Justin Green's
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attempt to exorcise the
weight that his Binky Brown series ended up representing for him.[3] [FIG
13] Tyler and Julia Green opened the casket to show me what they had put
inside. The material includes a photograph of the casket at their home in
California, before he shipped it to Ron Turner at Last Gasp comics. At the inside
top of the casket, they placed a pen-and-ink drawing by Green of a naked woman
crouched atop two bound books, reaching out to touch a human skull. [FIG 14]
Tyler told me that the woman could represent her or Julia Green reaching out to
touch the dead artist, and kneeling on top of his art work. Below the drawing
is a two-page letter by Tyler to her husband, dated March 27, 2020, and asking
him for some of the basic documentation helpful to loved ones after a person's
death: preferences for distributing personal possessions, passwords for bank
accounts, and so on. An uncompleted, official-looking form for writing down
one's "Last Will and Testament" is attached just below. Right under
that is perhaps the artist's last drawing, done in red pencil on a yellow legal
pad: a smiling face – of a ghost? – and an arrow facing downward, as though the
answer to Tyler's request for Green's last wishes might be found below.
However, she told me that her husband left no will or final directives. Instead
of a last will and testament, he left a final joke.
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Justin
Green's contribution to the early history of minicomics is featured through
original art in the display case standing in the center of the room. [FIG 15]
In his homage to the late artist, comics historian Patrick Rosenkranz states
that "Justin Green's Spare Comic… initiated the mini-comic genre, along
with 'Jud' Green's Underground Cartooning Course."[4]
Artwork for both of those minicomics is included here. [FIG 16] Julia
Green explained to me that her father would take his minicomics art to a
Kinko's store to reproduce it on photocopy machines. Another minicomic in the
exhibition recounts the birth of Julia Green through the narrative of a stork
character flying to various addresses where her parents had lived, before
finally finding them in the San Francisco General Hospital and passing out on
the floor, after having delivered the baby to her happy parents, shown together
with her in a photo.
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The other
large exhibition space is titled "Binky." [FIG 17] A copy of
the first edition of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary hangs on the
left wall, followed by a double row of reproductions of its forty-two pages,
lined up in sequence, and of its back cover. [FIG 18] Two installations
and a display stand in the room feature a variety of objects recalling Green's
life and art. They include calligraphic ink pens, a can of used house paint, a
statuette of the Virgin Mary, a Catholic prayer card, and badminton birdies. At
the center of one installation a cloth sew-on patch with the word
"Noyatin," Binky Brown's incantatory word for diminishing the anguish
of his obsessive compulsions, sits atop a large book of Catholic catechism, as
though the patch were there to ward off the Catholic taboos and rituals that
haunted Binky Brown, and his creator. [FIG 19] The back halves of both
left and right walls feature mounted pages with quotations from letters to
Justin Green and from statements about him and his work, made by famous people
ranging from Kim Deitch, Matt Groening, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Art Spiegelman,
to Federico Fellini, Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut. Several are excerpted from
the Justin Green memorial organized by John Kelly on the blog of The Comics
Journal.[5]
Tyler and Julia Green also included excerpts from their own published
statements about the artist. This room too contains original art, including
"Binky Brown in Toronto," and, notably, "The 1949 Slinky
Slur," featuring Binky Brown as a boy. The latter story, drawn in 1988,
evokes boyhood rituals of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and critiques bullying
and racist cruelty. The episode might have been taken from the artist's own
life, Julia Green said. |
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Just behind
the long room with "The Underground" section are several small exhibition
spaces. They are set up in a way that recalls living history museums, often
associated with urban or rural working classes, or else living spaces of the
rich that are preserved in fine art museums. These are, in fact, shrines,
carefully and lovingly reconstructed by Tyler and Julia Green, just as is, of
course, the entire exhibition. One of them, titled "Inner Sanctum," reconstitutes
the artist's living space in his final months, but also evokes his entire life.
[FIG 20] It includes Green's plaid shirts arranged on a wall, around one
of several mandelas that he painted close to the end of his life to try to cope
with his illness and his mortality. [FIG 21] On the floor lie his
paint-stained clogs. His guitar is propped up against an armchair. [FIG 22]
Tyler told me that she had placed the urn with Green's ashes on the chair for a
memorial ceremony. During the event, family members brought and laid on it,
next to the urn, personal objects with special meaning for the artist and his
life, such as a drawing he made as boy that symbolized his lifelong desire to
follow his own path, which was opposite from that of others. A printed page
with the ceremony's order of events rests on a filing cabinet. Above the
armchair hangs a self-portrait that Green painted while in high school. His
books and personal photos sit on a bookcase and shelves. On a wooden stand lies
a hot plate on which he heated up substances contained in labeled bottles and
cans, concoctions with which he tried to cure himself of the cancer that
finally killed him, as Tyler explained to me.[6] [FIG
23]
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Outside the
"Inner Sanctum," in a hallway leading toward the gallery's back room,
is a display case with samples of Green's calligraphic work, made for a friend.
In other display cases and attached to the wall are dozens of pieces of
original artwork by Green, for a myriad of projects, ranging from Binky Brown
stories to his Pulse! magazine work, and projects for cartoons and
comics. [FIGS 24, 25] One, a cover illustration for a projected but
never published collection of drawings, is titled "Notes before closing
time, Justin Green, Cincinnati, 2009." On it, the grim reaper's reflection
appears in a mirror, startling the artist, who is sitting at the counter of a
bar or a diner. [FIG 26] Tyler told me that he was always thinking about
death. Green's sign-painting work is also featured prominently in this area.
Artifacts include a sign he made to advertise his sign-painting business, and sketches
for signs he made for others. The last sign he painted, for the bathroom in
Julia Green's gallery, is at the end of the hall, around the corner.
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At the
very back of the gallery, in a large workshop or storage area, lies another
installation. [FIGS 27, 28] It reconstructs a scene that Justin Green
painted: a pastiche of The Art of Painting (or The Allegory of
Painting; circa 1866–8). The latter is a self-reflexive representation of
the art of painting – a self-portrait of the artist in the process of painting
a woman's portrait – by Johannes Vermeer van Delft.[7]
Green made his version, depicting "a small sign shop somewhere between the
Vietnam Era… and 1986," to illustrate the front cover of the October 2001
issue of Signs of the Times, a national sign-painter's monthly magazine based
in Cincinnati, to which he contributed a comic strip for years. [FIG 29]
Through his own self-reflexive image, Green asserts that sign painting and
cartooning are both arts, just as was the work of the Dutch old master. Tyler
and Julia Green both described Justin Green's masterful sign painting skills for
me. His former partner from his sign painting business in California helped create
the installation for the gallery, including by printing the large backdrop
behind it. A poster version of Green's page is available for sale from the
gallery. Tyler told me that her husband had asked her to have copies printed as
presents for the caregivers at the hospice where he spent his final days. A
copy of the poster is attached to an easel set in front of the built
installation, so that one may view together, in a meta-representational mise-en-abîme,
both the poster and the (rest of the) installation, which reproduces the scene
that Green depicted in his illustration.
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The remaining
installation is titled "The Studio." Situated across the hallway from
"Inner Sanctum," it is itself another self-reflexive artistic work,
and also again contains one. The installation recreates Justin Green's
cartooning workspace, which Tyler and Julia Green took from home and reassembled
in the gallery. [FIG 30] It is a three-dimensional mise-en-abîme that
incorporates a two-dimensional one: original art drawn by Justin Green and referring,
like "Notes before closing time," to his impending death. On his own
wooden easel, below his desk magnifying glass, its light still on, sits a
half-finished illustration, as though he had just stepped away from his work. [FIG
31] As Julia Green pointed out to me, the image is exceptional in terms of
her father's usual creative process, because instead of being wholly at one
stage – say, the pencil rough, or the page then being inked, or colored – it
combines various stages. The illustration's title and image suggest that this
was entirely intentional, and that the artist meant it to be his final artistic
statement. The title is "The last will and testament of Binky Brown, by
Justin Green." Just as does the installation in which it is set, the image
represents Green's drawing studio, with his easel and chair, pens and inks,
paintbrushes and paints. The lower part of the image, still in the pencil rough
stage, depicts the artist seated at his desk, with a mostly empty thought
balloon above his head. He is turning around, because he is being called away right
in the middle of his work. "Let's go, pops!" says a thin, skeletal
figure with a scarf around its neck, standing behind the artist. This is
clearly death summoning Justin Green before he has completed his final project,
perhaps an anthology of his comics, something he had imagined doing but was
never able to complete. We might also view the illustration as a reflection of
the artist's relation to the entire exhibition itself, which – Tyler and Julia
Green have said – he had hoped to see through to completion before his death.
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According
to Julia Green, it was her father who titled the exhibition "Binky Brown's
Funeral Pyre."[8]
This meta-artistic statement must be yet another self-aware irony of Justin
Green, to which those he left behind have given form. If a funeral pyre
involves heaping personal effects in a pile and lighting them to feed a fire
that cremates the deceased, here, instead of being piled up and burned, those
effects are exhumed and laid out carefully in sequences. They are relics of the
dead artist, carefully and lovingly arranged so that the living may both mourn
and celebrate him. In fact, Tyler told me that she is currently making a book
about mourning. While I visited the exhibition, listening first to Julia Green
and then to Tyler tell me about the artist's life and work, family friends came
in, viewed the exhibition, and chatted with them. Recordings of Justin Green playing
the blues on his guitar provided background music in one of the rooms. To visit
the exhibition, and to listen to his wife and daughter speak about him, is be
able to participate, empathetically, in a kind of ritual, both sacred and secular,
in something like a wake for the dead artist, someone who made tremendous artistic
accomplishments, despite suffering enormous pain throughout his life, because
of his anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The exhibition teaches us
much about Justin Green's life and art, but we will soon be able to learn even
more. Carol Tyler and Julia Green are planning publications of Justin Green's Binky
Brown series and other comics, sketches and notes, correspondence, and no doubt
much more. [FIG 32] A book biography of the artist by John Kelly is in
the works, as is Married to Comics, a documentary film by John Kinhart about
Carol Tyler and Justin Green, with a release planned in the near future.
The
author took all the photographs that illustrate this review. The art and
installations in the illustrations are all © the Estate of Justin Green. Any
republication of the photographs requires prior authorization from the author
and from the executors of the Estate of Justin Green.
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