Don Mabie and William Blake, Part 2

My point about money deserves some expansion. Blake lived a modest life with his wife in London for all but the three years in Felpham. He had neither great fame nor much wealth. He relied on a very few patrons to help put food on the table, and yet he had the following to say to one of these patrons, Dr. Trusler, when Trusler dared criticize Blake’s work, apparently saying that its meaning was obscure: “that which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.” In this same letter, Blake says he is happy to report that his works “have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped.” Blake was willing to lose a patron who did not appreciate his work. As for Mabie, he does not seek out either patrons or customers. Rather he is known for his freely passing on his art through mail art or through artists’ trading cards sessions, and through the simple act of giving. Recently he has used Facebook to share his art. This is not to say that Blake and Mabie do not sell what they create, but it is to say that they do not go to any lengths to sell what they create. Their interest is in art, not capital.

            What connects these two artists for me is not only their fierce commitment to art as a crucial human activity and a political intervention, but also their desire to see connections between the arts. More specifically, I am interested in the conjoining of word and image. Blake is well known for what he terms his “illuminated” poetry, poetry engraved along with illustrations that are then hand-coloured. In these works, words and images share a visual field forming one aesthetic expression. The words are part of the visual experience. To hear Blake’s poetry is to miss half of the experience; to see this poetry is to experience the word as not only semantic but also semiotic. Most relevant here is an engraving Blake made in 1820. He engraved a drawing he had made of the ancient statue of Laocoon, the priest of Poseidon who warned his countrymen in Troy of the Trojan Horse. Blake surrounded the drawing with numerous epigrams and gnomic sayings, one of which I have used for the epigraph to this essay. Looking at the engraving, we see that the words serve to compliment the two snakes, good and evil, that wrap about the figures. Words, like snakes, are both good and evil. The various apothegms that surround the image are puckish, audacious, and provocative. They speak of art and its central place in human activity. They speak of the curse of money. They inform us that we “must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art.” The words not only follow the contours of the figures, but they also block and frame the central image. They appear both random and ordered. They are more or less legible. They include some Greek letters along with the English script. The image as a whole both calls on art from the past and reinvents it. In its own way, this is an early instance of placing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

            Word and image – text – is also a central concern in Mabie’s art. Let’s take just one small instance, the painting “The Sun Is Not Yellow It’s Chicken.” Here Mabie uses words from a 1965 Bob Dylan song, “Tombstone Blues.” In the song, the words are spoken by the Commander-in-Chief who calls for the death of all those who “whimper and cry.” The Commander-in-Chief is either the U.S. President or Jesus. In any case, he calls for those who are fearful, who whimper and cry, who are, quite possibly, cowards to be put to death. To be a coward, in the vernacular, is to be either yellow or to be a chicken. Both words, yellow and chicken, denote a person who cowers, who shrinks from confronting something frightening. And so the colour of the sun may be yellow, but the sun itself is chicken, scared of its own brilliance perhaps. In effect, these words are both sensible in a silly way, and nonsensical in an equally silly way. In Mabie’s work, these words offer their silliness to the viewer/reader, and they present themselves as a visual design. Both the colours and the calligraphy draw the eye to shape and look of the words; they move us to experience the words visually rather than simply linguistically. The design is pyramidal, starting on top with a three-letter word. Under the apex is a four-letter word topping another three-letter word that sits on a six-letter word, then a three-letter word and finally a sturdy seven-letter word at the base. The pyramid nicely brings to mind empire, hierarchy, and politics. These are, after all, the words of the Commander-in-Chief. 

            This small painting is as audacious as, say, Blake’s verse, “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau.” Both these works, one visual, the other verbal, toss a challenge to the viewer/reader. These are works that rouse the faculties to act or at least they seek to rouse the faculties to act; the viewer/reader either engages with what he or she experiences here or walks away unthinking and unmoved. This is the kind of art we associate with what we now term Protest Art or Activist Art. This is art that asks the viewer or reader to think, and to think in ways that may be uncomfortable. We may think of this kind of art as relatively new, but like all art, it rests on tradition. This is art that gives us a fearful symmetry.

            Both Blake and Mabie draw on artistic tradition. Obviously both the “Laocoon” and the Bob Dylan song are works from the past, either a long distant past or a more recent past. We might say that both Blake and Mabie, in using works from the past so clearly, rob the past. They plunder and plagiarize and purloin. But such larceny is a form of praise, a form of memorializing. We might more accurately term this not plagiarism, but intertextualism. All truly great art takes from tradition, begs, borrows, or steals from that which has come before. Remember that rallying cry, “make it new,” well to make something new is to reshape what already exists. Indeed, the work of both Blake and Mabie celebrates and rests on the past. Blake’s drawing and painting echo Michaelangelo and Raphael, other Renaissance artists. Mabie draws inspiration from the Dada and Fluxus and Pop Art movements. Even a surrealist work such as Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” comes to mind, offering a similar playfulness to Mabie’s work. A more recent artist I also think of here is Jenny Holzer who gives us words and ideas in public spaces. Mabie’s digital collages are also relevant here, echoing such works as those of Richard Hamilton and others. And I would be remiss not to mention artists such as Duchamp, Warhol, and Steadman, whose works resonate in Mabie’s various productions. 

In other words, both artists know full well their debt to the past. Each of them makes use of Vitruvian Man as drawn by Leonardo da Vinci (c 1490). Da Vinci’s drawing has hand-written notes above and below the drawing, something picked up by both Blake and Mabie in their work. The figure with arms outstretched provides the original for Blake’s “Albion’s Dance,” aka “Glad Day” (1790/1793). Some prints of this image contain writing below the figure: “Albion rose from where he labour’d at the Mill with Slaves: Giving himself for Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death.” The subject is political. Albion or England rises above this revolutionary period triumphant. The outstretched arms suggest the crucifixion; England sacrifices himself for all nations. The depiction of a young Albion is celebratory, welcoming a new day of liberty and community. Or something like that. 

            This figure with arms outstretched is the signature of Chuck Stake, Don Mabie’s artistic alter ego. In Mabie’s version of Vitruvian man, the outstretched arms signify several things. First, of course, we have the allusion to da Vinci. More audaciously, we have this allusion to high art woven into allusions to sports. The referee in hockey and the base umpires in baseball use this gesture to indicate either the wipe out of a call or that a player is safe. Connecting sports with art is a gesture worthy of Dada, an indication of Mabie’s expansive notion of art and its place in culture, especially popular culture. Of course, the gesture is also cruciform, and in Mabie’s world this means parodic, a daring negation of any religious significance the gesture might have in other contexts. And finally, this figure relates to Blake’s “Glad Day” in its exuberant celebration of art’s potential for making things new, for, as it were, rebirth.