Gary Panter & Art Spiegelman.

In fall 2001, soon after Pascal Doury´s death, Bruno Richard asked NY artists Gary Panter and Art Spiegleman to record their thoughts and memories about Pascal.

Spiegelman: We’re going to talk about Pascal into a tape recorder for a few minutes.
Panter: I knew that Pascal was ill and I kind of expected this, but I’m still really sorry to hear it.

S: Did you ever meet Pascal?

P: Yeah, I met him in Paris when we went to visit Bruno. We went to his house. He was totally sweet, as I imagined he would be because of what Bruno had told me. He showed me his fabled library and I made the mistake of taking two books off the shelf instead of one, which made him visibly nervous. He was trying to hide his upset that there were two books off the shelf. At least, that’s the way I took it. He seemed to really care that there was only one book off the shelves at a time.

S: That place was amazingly-pristine.

P: It was like a museum. His library was like a museum.

S: Dust free. At that time he had a box that had a replica of his room inside it. It had these over-sized gouache-painted objects, versions of what he had in his house were in this box version of his house too. So it was a small box apartment with a box inside it. When I met him, I wasn’t that prepared for his library. I just assumed that what he would like would be mainly cartoon books. And the art books that he was collecting, actually, were of a kind… they were artists that were a bit too dry for me to really grab hold of. Like the Sol LeWitt-and-beyond-land, kind of minimalist and very conceptual; stuff that smells like ‘art’ to me.

P: He was very broadly-based, visually.

S: It was so odd because all of it would be cast into this idiom that was like his idiom. It almost seemed like it was a disconnect. It would be easy to understand how somebody would look at that stuff and go, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to be doing Damien Hirst polka dots on the wall’ and go off on some kind of tangent.

P: I can imagine that with someone like Sol LeWitt, in particular, just the precision would interest him; that Sol LeWitt would, say, draw a line a quarter of an inch away from this vast field. Although it was just one of the things he did, he made superhuman art. Perhaps he was enabled by, you know, elixirs. But still, most of the other people doing elixirs don’t produce superhuman art.

S: I think also, if anything, maybe those books had the impact of making him want to become an easel painter, as if that was somehow the high road to travel. What really knocked me out were his scratchboard drawings and his panels, things that told some kind of story, some kind of contained narrative even.

P: For me the scratchboards were the most superhuman things, because I couldn’t imagine that he would draw all those overlaps. It would have been much easier to just simulate it. That took superhuman concentration.

S: The paintings were also very meticulously made with these little strokes of gouache, or whatever he was using. What I always admired about his work was how that contained craft was used to express the total explosion.

P: Yeah. I was really jealous of that Catholic Pornography book. The kind of images in it were related to the kind of images I was trying to do and never could. Like those Woody Woodpecker and Yogi Bear kind of things. They were extremely effortless, extremely warm and extremely controlled, but explosive. There were so many things about it hitting correctly on so many levels.

S: It felt very honest, his work. The art books that he had under every shelf, under the bed and wherever, were like… I’ve always been more suspicious of that kind of work, even though I’ve
eventually come around to know how to look at it and like it. And I think it had to do with the fact that it felt like, whatever he was doing, this was a faithful record. [tape breaks] The rows of little heads or the densely layered material all seemed to have a theme, without being at all self-conscious. And that theme seemed to have to do with the innocence of the imagery that was important to him – these little dolls, these large-eyed creatures and the cartoon characters – all caught in hell.

P: But a real candied, bright, wonderful kind of hell.

S: Yeah, it was a pretty hell, that’s true.

P: His art expressed a lot of exclamation and intensity. But it seemed like what I would hear from Bruno about his life often seemed really tragic. About his wife, about him struggling to raise his child; just this ‘sensitive’ trying to exist in the world. And that this, finally happening to him, it seemed like he really lived through… [voice becomes choked up] You know, I hope he had… times of calm. His work has calm as well as agitation. It’s not one or the other.

S: Yeah, in fact it was kind of interesting when Pascal and Bruno would work together. There was this kind of collision between the frantic stuff that Bruno does and the precision Pascal brought
that impressed from the very first time I saw it in Elles Sont de Sortie. As a collaborative force, there was something really
powerful about seeing these two different forms of panic up against each other.

P: Every time I talk to students, I always bring them up. I always bring up the way they worked together and the strategies that Bruno told me about: two people trying to draw the same object in the same proportion, and switching pages, or drawing on the same pages. Those kind of games they developed are still missing, from young art culture. I’m always showing their stuff to American students, hoping it’ll crack their heads open and they’ll get more energy and more excitement and move to some other level. I don’t really see it happening. Maybe just a little bit. There are those guys at Paper Rodeo and Fort Thunder. There are also a lot of guys that draw like me and Bruno, those shadowy kind of drawings. Ron Regé was one of those guys. He’s in Drawn & Quarterly. So there’s a lot of energy there; pockets of something that begins to approach the kind of energy you see those French guys –particularly the Elles Sont de Sortie guys– bring into the world. The world doesn’t have it unless they bring it.

S: What especially drew me towards Pascal’s work was the fact that it was narrative. The Tête de Mort thing that we published in Raw, the Paul story; I was very proud to have those because that seemed like the best of that energy applied toward trying to make something that had exposition from picture to picture.

P: He did that. He did it masterfully. But, usually, they seemed to be anti-narrative. Bruno, in particular, was just against a story.

S: That’s why they worked well together, because Pascal’s precision drawing was trying to keep it focused. His need as an artist was to keep things focused. So, if it’s an explosion, it’s a very focused explosion.

P: And also just through his organising principles. Like the way that Catholic Pornography was organised, the format and ideas that would underline each issue. I’m sure it came from both of them, but I had an idea it came from his precision.

S: Yeah, and also from his sweetness. Whatever the drawings were of – whether it was people being killed, fucking, whatever – it came through a genuine sweetness that one would associate with a child. Not saccharine sweetness but a kind of innocence. Even though there were, I’m sure, rather sordid aspects to the things he lived through at one time or another – he lived with the chaos of whatever drugs he was diving around in – nevertheless, through all that, there’s still something very, very wide-eyed, not just about the characters he was drawing but about him. And it made him very charming to be with.

P: Bruno is very sweet in person. But totally concealed in his art.

S: No, Bruno’s a bad influence. Look at him! [laughs] But they did bring something to each other.

P: It seemed like he was often saving Pascal from himself. Many times I’ve heard Bruno say, ‘I don’t want to be part of this’. He would tell me about going to people and being really strong with them to get Pascal’s work back when Pascal had sold it too cheaply. Then he would just go sell it again or something. Those are half memories from me. I don’t know the truth.

S: Well, trying to wean him off drugs, and stuff like that as well. He was, in some ways, obviously a really tragic figure. Maybe that makes for some kind of cult because people like tragic artists. I wish the story could have a happier ending.

P: Yeah, I just wish more people would see his stuff. Everything I do is kind of aimed to push my work beyond my point of departure. I’m not quite sure about the purpose of that, when you really think about departing. But we’re still around and I’m really glad for the stuff I have by those guys.

S: Yup.

P: [unintelligible] And you had that wish about Elles Sont de Sortie too, that this stuff is so exciting you just hope it will be a virus and spread.

S: At this point I see lots of silk-screened books and, when I go to France, lots of small limited-edition publications. So, clearly, the ideas they had infected people around them.

P: This last week in class, I was trying to graph Bazooka, Elles Sont de Sortie and beyond for my students, writing their names in chalk on the board. And they had no clue at all what I was talking about! I think they were just horrified that I was writing French words up there.

S: It would be just as bad if you wrote Ma-tisse, Georges Braque or whatever. And I’m sure, to them – unfortunately, having also taught at the School Of Visual Arts – it’s up to you to tell them which ones are more famous, because they’ve never heard of any of them!

P: What I get is, ‘What’s the point of this exercise?‘.

S: ‘Will there be a test?’

P: The test of curiosity.

S: I think what you were saying before about how you’re just really glad to have this stuff, I guess that’s true for me too. I’m really glad to have those pictures in my head and on my shelves. And, I suppose that’s all that can be hoped for; is that it’s there, that somebody can find it. If it hits a responsive chord with them then something there is of value.

P: That I didn’t know Pascal more on a personal level, as a human or as a guy, shields me from a lot of the pain of this in some ways. I just have the bounty of his work.

S: I have images of the last time we saw him, when we were just beginning to work on Little Lit. We met at a café and he immediately grabbed Françoise [Mouly, Art Spiegelman´s wife] and dragged her round to this bookstore so he could show her some of the books he liked when he was a kid. I think we talked about
him doing something, although he didn’t like the idea. It wasn’t a pleasant interaction. As is often the case in seeing the work and meeting the person, one doesn’t necessarily imply the other.

P: Right. Your assumptions about what the person is going to be like from their work are usually kind of wrong anyway.

S: It’s sadness piled on sadness here. But, as you said, the work actually has a joyous quality. Somehow it’s celebratory…

P: It also has this aspect of a lot of the work I like, which implies it being a world. And you do feel like you could go into that Pascal world and it would go on for a long ways. You could probably sail through it for infinity.

S: I think ending on the word ‘infinity’ isn’t so bad.

P: Ok. • •

Published in Mollusk 04 / Special Pascal Doury(Bongout / Timeless)