TRUE AND IRREVOCABLE FAILURE
An OS [re:con]versation with Johnny Damm, author of FAILURE BIOGRAPHIES
[Editor’s note: Damm’s comics collage book Failure Biographies is currently available for pre-order — order your copy here!]
Greetings comrade! Thank you for talking to us about your process today!
Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
Greetings! I’m Johnny. I make comics using a scanner, an x-acto knife, and the library.
Why are you a “artist”/ “writer”/ “poet”?
Making art is one of many ways to stay engaged in larger communities — no better or worse than many other occupations. My particular practice gives me a rationale to continue researching and, I think, to continue grappling with difficult ideas. I value that.
Do you feel comfortable calling yourself an artist/writer/poet? What other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate?
I consider myself a minor member of a number of artistic communities. In different contexts, I receive different labels (artist, writer, cartoonist, poet). I’m fine with all of them.
What’s an “artist” (or “writer” or “poet”) anyway? What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
There’s no single definition that fits perfectly for any occupation, I think.
As for myself… When interviewed by the Operating System for my earlier book, The Science of Things Familiar, I described my work as an effort to explore “the house we all live in.” I think that still holds up. In my work, I try to show people areas of the house they might not have noticed on their own.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these comics as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this book in coming together? Was it a struggle?
Rarely do my comics start as independent entities. I wish they did more often, actually. Instead, I always start with at least the vague idea of a project. In this case, my project was “failure.” I wanted to make short pieces on artists that relate in some way to failure.
Fairly quickly, I isolated three types of failure I sought to explore: systemic failure (i.e. capitalism destroying the careers of women filmmakers), productive failure (i.e. Marta Minujín and Pope L.’s failed projects becoming the materials of their artworks), and political failure (i.e. the Tucumán arde group and Noah Purifoy’s failed attempts to create tangible political change with their art). Not every piece fits neatly into one of these categories, but I think these three types of failure echo through the book.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices do you use in the creation of your work?
I make comics out of other comics — in this case, a handful of horror and science fiction comics from the late forties and early fifties. My other primary source material came from Depression-era WPA photography. I constructed the comics using a blend of digital tools and physical collage.
Most typically, my process starts something like this: I scan a comic page into the computer and then print it out. The original comics were cheaply printed to begin with and then badly (at least my copies) damaged by age and neglect. The printer I use is itself a low-end, discontinued model, stocked with off-brand ink ordered in bulk off eBay. As you can imagine, this results in a poor-quality reproduction of the original comic page. I’m interested in the flaws added in the printing process (both by the original printing and then by my own) and often force my printer to keep printing even after it has begun to run out of ink.
My next step is to take an x-acto knife to the page. I slice out each panel and then begin the process of refilling them.
For Failure Biographies, my other constraint was that every speech bubble had to use the artists’ own words. I treated the text as another element of collage.
Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
I’m interested in repressed histories, narratives of history that run counter to the dominant construction. So, foundational works include Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and others. I recently read Kelly Lytle Hernández’s City of Inmates, and it’s perfect: everything I want from a history text. Indigenous activist Gord Hill makes explicitly educational comics; his The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book and The Antifa Comic Book use comics as counter-history brilliantly.
Related to form, the collage-comics of Jess provide great inspiration. Siglio Press published Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica at a time in which I was looking for permission to try new things in my work. Jess gave me that permission. And you can’t talk collage-comics without mentioning Jack Kirby, who incorporated collage in The Fantastic Four beginning in 1964. Perhaps my all-time favorite cartoonist, Julie Doucet, has also done some strong collage work.
Outside of economics, it’s a great time for indie comics, and I keep a particular eye on artists using pastiche. R. Sikoryak’s pastiche “illustrations” of un- or under-read texts — Apple’s user agreement, the U.S. Constitution — are technical and conceptual marvels. There’s a ridiculous wealth of talented comics artists working (mainly in the margins of the industry) right now.
Finally, I should mention the critical texts I draw from the most in Failure Biographies: Luis Camnitzer’s Conceptualism in Latin America: Didactics of Liberation, Kellie Jones’s South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta’s amazing catalog for Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. In particular, my characterization of Tucumán arde and the framing of Superbarrio as a performance artist come directly from Camnitzer. I also used Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia to help develop the conceptual framework for the project.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
I like to think of this book as part pulp comic and part educational textbook. The section titles reference this. As much as possible, I title my individual pieces after the original comics stories.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
I’d like the book to circulate widely. Adopt it for your classroom or library!
What does it mean to make books in this time, and what are your thoughts around shifting into digital books/objects and digital access in general?
Outside of economics, again, this is a great time for books. Digital access to books has put pressure on publishers and writers to reconsider how books operate as physical objects, and the book form is better for it, I think.
I’m a big proponent of the Operating System’s Open Access Library. Failure Biographies is only fully realized in its physical state: it is a physical object. But I also want people to have unfettered access to the text. So, for me, the Operating System strikes the right balance in its approach.
I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?
Writing is a communal activity. I think it is important to approach my work as adding to a larger conversation rather than positioning myself as an authority. I use the voices of others, because I want readers to hear these voices. But I also have a responsibility to not use the voices disingenuously — to not misrepresent the speakers, to not simply put the voices in my own mouth and make them say what I think they should say.
I actively work to not appropriate the voices which appear in my comics and to not appropriate the original comics used in my collages: these are not mine, and I am not taking them as my own.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. The publication of these volumes now falls during an ongoing global pandemic, intersecting with the largest collective uprising in US history, with Black Lives Matter, dismantling white supremacy, and abolition at the fore. How does your process, practice, or work reflect these conditions?
To answer this question, I want to talk about the past, specifically the years between 1965 to 1974. A good chunk of Failure Biographies occurs during these years: all the events related to Benjamin Patterson, Noah Purifoy, Tucumán arde, Pere Portabella, and Marta Minujín.
It would be impossible to list all the momentous national and world events that also occurred in these nine years, but I invite you to consider the atmosphere of this period and its dramatic seesaws between crisis and possibility, between oppression and revolution. With no adequate frame of reference, I imagine living through 1968 (the year of Tucumán arde), for example, as feeling a bit like living through 2020.
And in each of those nine years, an event called the Avant-Garde Festival was held in New York City. Much of what art historians now regard as avant-garde royalty participated: John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneeman, Nam June Paik, Christo, John Lennon…
As organized by performance artist Charlotte Moorman, the Avant-Garde Festival consistently imposed only a single rule on its artists: “NO POLITICS.”
What’s the role of the creative community, whether during those eventful nine years or now?
Well, I think the Avant-Garde Festival displays the destructive possibilities of art isolating itself from the larger political environment, how so-called “radical” artists can uphold and reinforce systems of oppression by insisting on separating art from “politics.”
The title of this book is a bit of a feint: I consider none of these artists or the works discussed here as having failed and question the value of “failure” as label. But I can’t help but see true and irrevocable failure in this tidbit from U.S. art history: “NO POLITICS.”
Thanks for the questions.
JOHNNY DAMM is the author of The Science of Things Familiar (The Operating System), named by the Publishers Weekly Critics Poll as one of the best graphic novels of 2017. His comics, essays, and visual poetry have appeared in Guernica, Poetry, The Offing, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Cruz, CA and teaches at San José State University. See more of his work at johnnydamm.com.
