Is it worth examining the fact that the pope died the weekend
Sin City
opened? Not that I'm saying, given the option, I would rather crack beers on the porch with Il Papa than
Sin
co-directors Robert Rodriquez and Frank Miller, but the Polish guy with the funny hat certainly tried to avoid mixed messages and straight shooters always make the best drinking buddies. Plus, you know, I'm down with Jesus and Mary, it's just the rest of the shebang I'm uncomfortable with and I like to think that, on a sunny afternoon with a couple Trappist ales in his belly, the pope would have agreed.
But I have to assume that any holy representative worth their robes would disagree with the popularity of
Sin City
. It's not really the killings and castrations and prostitution in the film-these are aspects of life that spiritual organizations are accustomed to handling, even a key raison d'être. It's not even the fact that the larger twin evils of
Sin City
are represented as government and "the church," with
one key religious figure turning out
to be a villainous cannibal. It's the content or, more to the point, the lack of it. Behind every character and storyline in
Sin City
is basically a lonely, sad kid with no self esteem. The idea that muscular, quasi-criminals enforce their own brand of street justice in order to defend pert-breasted prostitutes with hearts of gold and thus reap the dual satisfactions of rebellion and sexual rewards is inherently juvenile and insipid. It's a real bummer too, because the technical execution of the film is so very close to perfect.
If you like your visual food to look good but also to be packed with nutrients, skip the movie that's sweeping the nation and try the group exhibition of works on paper at Dwight Hackett Projects (2879 All Trades Road, 474-4043). Just because the work is on (or of) paper and the title is
Draw
, don't go thinking it's a drawing show. Creating a likeness is one possibility, but there are many more. Every time you draw cards in a poker game, you're taking a chance. You can draw a bath or a breath.
Draw
could refer to steeping tea or eviscerating cattle. A contest may end in a draw. A shallow gully is a draw and so is a particular, sleight-of-hand football fake-out. You could choose to draw enemy fire or to draw upon someone's strength. You might draw straws. The point is, there are many pieces in the show from many artists and the way each piece relates thematically to the other work and to a larger idea is excitingly elastic.
Elastic viewing is called for as well, since the large, open gallery is bordering on over-packed; there is very nearly too much in the room, but rather than present visual distractions, the effect allows a rush of excitement upon finding the real treasures, like hunting through a storage-filled attic.
To each their own treasure is a fair maxim, but for me it all starts with Peregrine Honig. The Kansas City-based artist has four small color drawings, oozing her characteristic blend of sweetness and horror, with little girls caught in the moment or act of bizarre and obscure concepts. In succession the works, all from 2005, are
Albocracy
,
Promenadaphobic
,
Trichiophagous
and
Apivorous
. Each drawing is delicate, neurotic and violent while also managing to convey a sense of something like wonder unplugged. In Apivorous, the subject is hacking up a wad of bees and to see it feels like catching Tinker Bell spitting chewing tobacco during intermission. The little girls lose their iconic and absurd innocence in Honig's world, but still project the disapproval and shame of things like governance by white people (
Albocracy
) or ingesting one's own hair (
Trichiophagous
). With a hint of sex and exploitation often limning Honig's work (though not so much in this current series), she massages some of the same veins that
Sin City
beats viewers over the head with. It is because her work comes from life, from real perceptions of being a woman and a girl, rather than from a masturbatory fantasy where sex and death are the answers to every question, that it is full of wonder and possibility rather than oversimplified, comic escapism.
Yes, even death in
Sin City
is a macho daydream. How is it that a series of three naive, quick, technically average drawings of dead robins by Kiki Smith carry more capacity for consideration and simple, emotive projection than an entire feature-length film? How can a product come out of a creative industry, be a collaboration between hundreds of people at the apex of their craft, be a technical triumph, and falter when compared to the lazy, afternoon doodles of one woman? Because plain old visual art hasn't yet reached the point where veneer is all that matters. Music and cinema rule the roost as far as popular influence and acceptance, but there's a plague of inanity on both their houses.
Not that those media aren't critical influences on artists coming of age in the thick of their reign, though. NB Dash's graphite on paper drawings showing a dark, crouched figure, poised with cinematic drama in a landscape flattened enough to appear as a cross-section of the world, owe much to the emotional influence of popular film and music as well as the original form of
Sin City
, the graphic novel.
Imi Hwangbo's careful edging of ink on a hand-cut, mylar floor rosette and similar treatment of a layered ribbon of mylar sheets with patterned cut-outs owe more to design but radiate like living, cellular constructions, exchanging information with the viewer rather than sitting as passive object. And a 1982 work of oil paint and collage on paper by Jay DeFeo has more tension in its vibrant soup of color and texture, having been worked right to the edge of losing all form and hue but only just keeping it all, than a year's worth of mainstream movies.
Sin City
didn't kill the pope and no amount of papal edicts will ever force people to appreciate content, but somewhere between perfect production and overbearing morality, there's a draw, a shallow gully of disputed territory where honest investigation is allowed to steep until it's ready to provide some nourishment.
