Thinking about Chris Ware's piece on Philip Guston in McSweeney's No 13. Thinking about the distinction he was drawing - oops, making - between comic art and "art" art that is influenced by comic art. Thinking maybe there was something to this, I wandered over to the National Gallery of Australia's international rooms, which have had a re-hang, and there on the wall about next to where Pollock's "Blue Poles" had until recently been, was a Guston I don't think they've had on the walls in the six years we've been up here. Thinking, who was the forward-looking curator who had been picking these works up before they had any kind of serious recognition, especially over here. Well, looking at this painting, "Bad Habits", you can, I think, see Ware's thesis in action. Yes, as a painting it is, you might say, "cartoon-like". (The vertical-slit eyes on the two Klan-like hooded figures may or may not have been a nod to early Disney characters.) Yes, it is hanging on a wall, in a frame, devoid of any narrative or other context. Yes, I think this does put it on another plane from sequential comic-book art, or even illustration work, which sits on a page or a poster, most likely with text around it, and an explicit/implicit shelf life. A painting, this painting, is to be looked at, on its own terms, an object suspended outside of time and space.
What am I saying here? Only, I think, that the recognition of influence belittles neither Guston, nor the comic strip artists who influenced him or those who came after (Guston, for example, has clearly been an influence on Ware; Crumb's influence on art/art's influence on Crumb shoots back and forth like a degenerate electrical current). Perhaps the bigger question is how Guston got to here, in 1970, from "Prospects", in 1964, a black and grey, purely abstract painting presently hanging nearby, which, to my eyes, carries no hint of Guston's future direction (c.f. the "totem"-style early Pollock in the collection, which, while still being a long way from "Blue Poles", could conceivably have dribbled from the same brush). Which is not to comment on the relative merits of the two Gustons; only to observe. And observation, "Ways of Seeing", as John Berger put it, is what looking at art (as opposed to looking at - reading - comic books) is all about.
