Okay, I admit it, that’s a very personal definition of genius. But it works for me.

By my lights, Grant Morrison is a genius. Unfortunately he’s also writes comics, which means that his work doesn’t reach the large audience it merits. From his earliest work on Zoids through Animal Man and Doom Patrol (which were like a crash course in postmodernism to my young mind) to the philosophical gangbang of The Invisibles all the way through to the fever dream that was Seven Soldiers. Morrison has chased that vision. If you want to know what that vision is, then you’ll just have to read the books.

So where does We3 fit into this scheme? It was one of three series that Morrison wrote at around the same time - the other two being the radio rental SeaGuy and the not-quite-as-insane Vimanarama - presumably as a way of excising some of the toxic byproducts generated by working on mainstream comics. Pop comics, each series three issues long, packed with hook moments and throwaway ideas woven together with some fantastic art - and none more so than We3, where the man Frank Quitely handles the picturing. And if you know Frank Quitely, expect some serious handling.

The short version: We3 is Plague Dogs with heavy weapons. Yet while the action sequences are some of the most visually stunning work I’ve ever seen, the scene that made the most impact on me manages to sum up the entire series in a single line. After unsuccessfully trying to save a man - and despite having earlier killed several - Weapon 1 (the friendly dog) takes the initiative to bring all 3 of the weapons to safety.

“Home is run. No. More.” makes me well up inside. That’s right, you insensitive jerks, even a mountain man such as myself can cry at a comic. For anybody who’s ever been in trouble of the deep and enduring kind, this is the definition of home - the place where you can stop running, the sanctuary that will sustain you. At the same time, that home doesn’t really exist - and that trouble that you found? It’ll always find you, even if it has to follow you home.

So we watch the weapons trying to find a place where they can stop running, even though we know they’ll never find it. The tragedy is that while they’re smart, they’re not smart enough to realise that; the twist of the knife is that we recognise ourselves in them. The tragedy at the heart of We3 is not something amenable to persuasion.

In fact I am wrong, as I frequently am. It turns out that We3 (or at least two of them) will find a place where they will run no more. The last issue of the 3-part series scales up the action with a battle sequence with the monstrous Weapon 4, but bottles out right at the end. Morrison is strong on closure - think of The Filth, with it’s last line of “We have love” - but he isn’t usually afraid to make that closure painful for the reader. We3 gives us a Hollywood ending - perhaps designed for the inevitable bidding war over movie rights - but as a result my disappointment was palpable.

I’ve got no fundamental objection to Hollywood endings, but if you’re going to flirt with tragedy, eventually you have to consumate the relationship. Otherwise you’re selling everybody short: readers, characters, yourself. We all need to know that the flaws in our personalities hold, that we don’t live happily ever after, that the battle is more important than the victory (because the outcome of the battle is a foregone conclusion).

So We3 makes me cry twice - once for the truth of Run No More, and once for the lie that the ending tells us, a lie that lessens the truth.

The exhibit included three sets - Suite Vollard, Suite 156 and the Tauromaquia. Suite 156 was the most familiar, with cubist elements in place, drawn out at the end of Picasso’s life. It was in 156 that his sense of humour came out most, with sly digs at other paintings, other painters and even at himself - with pieces like “Old Man and Woman with Athlete and Dwarf”, how could it be otherwise? This lightheartedness was countered by the sequence of etchings depicting Rape, in which themes found in the Suite Vollard thirty years previously - the Minotaur on the woman, the female toreador on the bull - were echoed, but with far more venom. The rapist looks almost placid, his expression blank in the classical style seen in other parts of the suite, while the woman contorts beneath him in barely-human positions. I found them difficult to look at, but not as difficult as the Tauromaquia.

The Tauromaquia is a sequence of pictures depicting the exact sequence of a bullfight, a subject close to Picasso’s heart. Like all fans of the corrida, he clearly sees a beauty there which will escape me forever; I cannot overcome my feelings of injustice enough to enjoy these drawings much.¹ I can appreciate the technical skill displayed, however. Each of the pictures is a miniature composed of nothing more than brief, narrow strokes - there is no detail, no perspective and no movement to be seen, yet each picture is a perfect snapshot of a precise moment of the event, from the arrival at the stadium to the final departure of the toreador on the shoulders of his admirers. My sympathy remains with the bull; the picture that stands out most is titled “Dragging out a bull that is not belligerent enough”; make love, not war.

Make love is exactly what the bull - or at least the minotaur - does in the Suite Volland, when he’s not being blinded and lead around by a young girl. The Suite divides into roughly three sections. The bulk of it is neoclassical studies of the sculptor and his models, the sculptor being both Picasso and Zeus, the models being both powerful and dominated. A significant remainder shows the minotaur, taking the place of the sculptor with his models, then being injured, then walking blinded through unwelcoming city streets. The text reminds us that this was a novelty, the minotaur, traditionally a symbol of virile aggression, laid low by the weapons of man. The cheers of the bullring echo in the minotaur’s ears as he picks up the stick that will be his guide for the rest of his life.

The third section is simple: three portraits of Picasso’s sponsor, Ambroise Vollard. These were added to complete the suite up to 100 pictures, but they were done in a much more naturalistic style than the others. Lined up in a row on the wall, at the heart of the museum, they look like nothing less than Andy Warhol working in pencil; an identical pose repeated with variations only in shading and tone. They look nothing like we’d expect a portrait by Picasso to look, but they show the essence of a painter, the need to capture somebody at that moment in time. Vollard didn’t just commission this particular suite; he was responsible for Picasso’s initial financial success, the security that made his later work possible.

These portraits could easily show the money, the respect that the money paid for, the debt of the painter to the patron; but they just show a man, plain and simple, sketched out lightly and frowning slightly at us through our many years of over-exposure to Picasso, reminding us of the simple skill of the artist.

1. Yet I’m aware that my reaction towards these is more extreme than my reaction to the rape pictures, which is of course both mystifying and unacceptable to me.

I will always remember the things of the past

and I have no need

to bow down to the golden calves of the future

which sleep in the cattle wagon

on the road to the new Europe

and its abattoirs

which have been turned into discos.

- Delimir Resicki

(HT: Greg Dotzauer @ Der Tagesspiegel Via signandsight)

Soodad was injured in the Canal Hotel bombing but after moving to London, she’s made an amazing recovery and is now pursuing a career as an artist. Her paintings are dark and deep, almost abstract but with a mythic storytelling quality. Her work is going to be part of the Untitled Artists Fair in London this year, from Saturday 31st May - Sunday 1st June at Chelsea Old Town Hall. Admission is free but you need to have tickets - download them from this link. Come on, free art! What more could you ask for?

While reading this post, you should be listening to Modern Art by Art Brut.

Wait, maybe it would be possible to marry a comic. I’ll get back to you on that one. In the meantime, here’s a page from Issue 1, as our “hero” Casanova Quinn falls from a plane. I would attempt to summarise the plot, but I’m not that stoned - basically, he’s a bad egg turned good, in the process of hopping between parallel universes, while carrying out a range of spicy spy missions. There you go.

When I was touring the Seattle Art Museum earlier this year, a small child wandered onto the outskirts of the installation “Some/One” by Do-Ho Suh. Almost immediately a security guard stepped up to the hem of the installation and instructed the child to get off. The guard probably didn’t realise that he was going against the artist’s wishes, and definitely didn’t realise he was acting out the tension embodied in the piece.

In an interview with Art21, Do-Ho Suh explained that

Every time I install “Some/One” you always face the back of the piece first… And that means you don’t see the interior of the piece when you enter the room. You have to go through the steps and walk on the piece and then walk around the piece and then finally you face the front of the piece and then you are able to see the inside of the piece. And that moment is very important, I think. Not only experiencing the piece physically by stepping on the dog tags, but also when you see the reflection of yourself inside of the piece. Then you truly become a part of the piece.

While much of Suh’s work is really about questioning identities, it relies heavily on military reference points. As he says in the interview, since a two-year military service is mandatory in South Korea, “that’s a great deal of the Korean man’s identity,” and this militarism saturates “the whole Korean society, the whole system is actually based on this militaristic, very hierarchical structure.”

In countries which maintain national service - Switzerland is a good example - the military is more easily accepted than in countries where serving in the army is the exception rather than the rule. When everybody goes through the same institution, that institution comes to seem intensely normal, no longer worth discussing - and so it goes from being accepted to being politely ignored:

For me, again, this experience in the military was not something special because everyone had to go through and has to go through that process in Korea. So if you talk to someone who went to military, they all have similar stories. That made me a little bit more comfortable to use this military experience. Maybe it’s something special here in the States, but if I show “Some/One” in Korea then I think it will get a different response because it was part of their everyday life.

I wonder what that response would be? In Korea the after-effects are everywhere, as Suh notes: “I think also that probably most Korean men also have this interest…I don’t know if it’s the right word…but some kind of fetishism about this stuff.” Some of the Korean films I’ve watched recently expose this undercurrent, a sensibility where the military is the lens through which society is viewed (Joint Security Area), the carrier of the national memory (R-Point) or the subterrain of Korean society, waiting to break through to the surface (The Host).

Is the Korean military system a reflection of that “whole Korean society,” that “militaristic, very hierarchical structure,” or is it vice versa? A modern military is continually tensed between needing to have the rigid structures and processes that are essential for planning and training, and the flexible reactions and creative thinking that are essential for combat operations. In the same way, Do-Ho Suh’s installation has the same feeling - a very formal, static piece that shimmers with a thousand possible interpretations.

What does SAM say? Some/One

represents artist Do-Ho Suh’s interest in individual and collective identity… as the title of the work indicates, juxtaposes the collective-represented by a larger-than-life armor sculpture-and the individual, consisting of life-size shiny-metal dog tags, each unique and representing a single soldier.

Yet the reverse is also true; the armour can only be worn by one individual, who relies on the protection of the collective represented by the dogtags. Who writes these museum pieces?

Literalist interpretations of the installation make me want to punch somebody out of sheer tedium. Suh reports that “Somebody told me it reminded them of Christ or that statue in Rio de Janeiro”, presumably because all sculptures that form a human figure with outstretched arms must be related, right? Surprisingly that person didn’t mention the Piss Christ, probably because they were a bourgeois art dabbler with no taste. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but if you can’t respond to a piece of art with a bit more imagination than that, then why bother going to a museum in the first place?

Do-Ho Suh’s installation is an advertisement for a new brand of Korean alcoholic beverage, designed to catch your eye as you’re driving home late one night through Seoul or Los Angeles. It’s the winning entry in a competition to find the most innovative fashion design that combines high camp with excellent protection, for Hollywood starlets with intense concerns for their personal safety. It’s a scene from a film where the ancient armour is stolen by evil forces and the souls of the dead are channeled through to create an unbeatable enemy for our (as yet nameless) hero. Or possibly a discarded plot idea for Samurai Jack.

Some/One feels like a dream sequence for one simple reason: it emerged fully formed from a dream that Suh had.

It was night and I was outside of this kind of football stadium and I was approaching this stadium from the distance and I saw this light in the stadium. And so I thought there’s some kind of activities going on. And as I approached the stadium in order to enter the stadium, I started to hear these clicking sounds, like the sound when the metal pieces touch together. It was like there were thousands of crickets in the stadium. And then I entered the stadium in the way that the football players enter the stadium. I walked slowly and went into the stadium on the ground level. And then I see this reflecting surface in the dream and I realized I was stepping on these metal pieces that were the military dog tags.

Back to that overly-officious guard telling off the kid who recreated those night-time imaginings and wandered onto Suh’s field of dreams. The irony that he completely missed is that he and the child represented the two aspects of the military that I mentioned earlier - the rigid rules versus the creative thinking. We need that tension not just in the military, but in our daily lives, and we need Do-Ho Suh to remind us.

You can read the complete Art21 interview with Do-Ho Suh, listen to a short mp3 interview, or watch a RealPlayer presentation of Some/One. The internet just blows my mind.