Monday, January 19, 2009

The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Carel Moiseiwitsch's This Is a True Story - Coda

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Images:
1. Flash Marks' cover (June 1989): Flash Marks is an anthology of Carel Moiseiwitsch's previously published material put out by Fantagraphics Books;
2. the first page of "Police May Have Erred in Slaying!," Weirdo # 13 (1993 [Summer, 1985]);
3. a particularly intense page from "Impasse," Twisted Sisters Comics # 1 (April, 1994); autobio, methinks, by Carel Moiseiwitsch;
4. "Priapic Alphabet," Drawn & Quarterly # 5 (June, 1991); war is seen as a "men's thing;" it's also interesting to notice that the civilian victims are already a Muslim woman and her child;
5. after police brutality and war: ecology (5., 6., 7., 8., 9., images caught at http://www.freexero.com/);
6., 7. Carel Moiseiwitsch's paintings about the Palestinian situation are more interesting as reportage than they are as works of art per se:
6. Detainees (Arrayoune Square, Nablus, March 6, 2003, 2003);
7. Women Waiting (Asseera Checkpoint, March 9, 2003, 2003);
8., 9. two panels from "This Is a True Story" (Positions, East Asia Cultural Critique, Volume 13, number 1, Spring 2005).

PS It's obvious that Carel Moiseiwitsch's art is overtly political, but isn't it also true that the same thing could be said about every single art work ever created? Why don't we say it then? As Ariel Dorfman so aptly put it (The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds, Pantheon Books, 1983: 192; translation by Clark Hansen): "To go against the grain is political; to flow with it is entertainment."

No comments: