Georgiana Banita

A seemingly minor episode in Françoise Mouly’s biography holds special significance for the intersection of comics and the avant-garde during Art Spiegelman’s early career. In 1975, having arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket and eager to improve her English by reading comics, Mouly had a part in Richard Foreman’s play Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, performed by his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at 491 Broadway. Despite her shaky command of English, Mouly had no trouble slipping into her role. Almost none of the dialogue was delivered live by the actors. The avant-garde director, seated on the edge of the stage with an electronic keyboard that spliced together music and speech, narrated the entire event. The play was a hit. “This is an outlandish investigation of inner space,” a New York Times reviewer enthused, “a dream-like exploration of the associative method.” It is from a similar interest in art as “happening,” a dreamlike realm devoid of narrative structure—what by extrapolation from Foreman’s “total theater” might be called “total comics”—that Spiegelman’s underground comics emerged. Spiegelman dazzled avant-garde audiences with comics and cartoon fans with avant-garde effects to defy expectations on both sides, thwarting panel sequence and linearity the same way Foreman choreographed words, things, and bodies in his deceptively “pandering” performance. It is fair to say that despite the play’s title, Foreman was hardly an accessible playwright; and even though he hired actors who merely “stood still for hours onstage, shifting poses only once or twice,” his performance art is all about creative improvisation. Both he and Spiegelman sought a quality at once unaffected and rigorous, a way of employing nonsense to explore how the human mind constitutes creative meaning. In this view, “pandering to the masses” calls for a descent into the underground of the human mind where its primal consciousness unfurls. To Foreman, this meant diving into his own subconscious, where he would curate stage-worlds that served as representations of his own psyche. For Spiegelman, the avant-garde energy of countercultural New York fostered a comparable style of free association, from the cryptic surrealism of his late-sixties drawings for MAD cofounder Wally Wood to much of the New Wave design and pulp cubism of the artwork collected in Breakdowns (1977) and within the pages of RAW magazine in the early 1980s. In his telling, “comics are a way of putting id creatures on paper”; they “have a pipeline to something very basic about the way people think.”