JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2005
Walton
Ford and the Temple of Doom: Or, Judging Books by Their Covers
I wanted today’s lesson to be about
the undoubtedly unscrupulous, exploitative process by which actual art gets
turned into the sandwich board that is the modern mass-market book cover.
But nobody in that industry wants to
admit to being unscrupulous and exploitative—surprise, surprise—and so I am
left in the fortunate position of having to write about truths deeper than obvious,
pre-fabricated opinions. Namely, the appeal of coincidence,
the vagaries of human observation skills and the thrill of encountering a
fellow spirit (as well as the retrospective horror of almost missing one).
This all began over the summer, as I
was reading David Quammen’s extraordinary book
“Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the
Mind,” a well-informed meditation on the symbolic significance and ecological
precariousness predacious animals hold simultaneously as we concomitantly
worship and murder them.
I could easily digress here into how
virtually everything I find worth writing about begins with something I read;
somehow, I feel a compulsion to explain that, when more objectively I can see
it’s pathetic that so few things are book-inspired these days. American society
has much more explaining to do than I, I fear.
Quammen’s book was well-received upon
its 2003 publication, and I must note that I bought it in hardcover
(remaindered—sorry, David) on the strength of its “New York Times” review, not
on its jacket.
That’s not to say I didn’t notice
the jacket. It’s lightly textured paper, fairly light stock, and illustrated
with a painting of a tiger stalking on high ground, with some type of flooded
fields in the background and a foreground that includes a transparent glass
sphere lying on the ground. The tiger is coming from the right and is in
profile, captured in a rather 18th century fashion—naturalistically
detailed, but unnaturally poised, with a gaping/snarling maw, flattened ears,
eye looking sideways and right paw outstretched in something between a step and
a swipe. That is to say, it has the heroic pseudo-naturalism of taxidermy.
Its (and the painting’s) other half
is on the back cover, largely obscured by a big box of log-rolling publicity
blurbs by the likes of Jon Krakauer (who might as
well officially change his surname to “Author of ‘Into Thin Air.’”) Here, a
tangle of rope lies near the tiger’s rear paws, along with a twisted stump and
a suggestion of fire.
My first instinct was that this was
some 1600s Dutch painting, an instant opinion formed by the overall style, and
the presence of the glass sphere (a trompe l’oeil device common to the time and place) and watery,
subdivided farmland practically screaming, “The dikes have failed!” in the
background.
So then I looked on the back inside
jacket flap and saw the “jacket illustration” credited to one “Walton Ford,”
who hardly sounded like some deceased Dutch. “Jacket design” was credited to a
“John Fulbrook III,” who is one of those advertising
figures as shadowy and untraceable as whatever fascist squad of frustrated
artists produces beer commercials or that new Mitsubishi ad with the truck
urinating in fear. Which is to say, my next instant opinion was
to discard Mr. Ford from my memory as just another resident of our society’s
leading position of sinecure, the Evil Whore. And I turned, as I am wont
to do, to the contents of the book instead, instantly adopting the paradigm
that privileges contents over cover, instantly agreeing that the outside is a
worthless attraction to be discarded once it has worked, like a shell casing or
a condom.
There things would have stayed if I
had not been, by coincidence, strolling with Quammen’s
book through the Boston Public Library, and if said library had not been
prominently displaying the Cuban novelist Eliseo
Alberto’s “Caracol Beach” in an edition whose jacket
consists of—the same painting, albeit reversed.1
I stopped automatically and checked
the inside cover. Yes, Walton Ford again (as exploited
by designer Susan Carroll this time). The publicists were showing their same
level of imagination: Quammen’s book is about tigers,
among other predators; Alberto’s book involves a character plagued by visions
of attacking tigers. But amidst this dross of materialistic over-obviousness
shone one truth: Walton Ford and his painting exist independently, outside of
this industrial, advertising context.
Finally, I was officially—and, one
might say, accidentally—interested. To put it another way, I had finally
noticed him and his painting—but only by noticing them twice.
Walton Ford richly rewarded my
attention to the point that he is now my new favorite artist. He’s also an
extremely apt pick to illustrate Quammen’s book—and,
as it turns out, has illustrated several of the author’s covers.
Ford’s mature work consists
primarily of large-scale watercolor-and-ink works depicting animals in the
gorgeous but Egyptianly
awkward style of John James Audubon, with a wealth of social (often
anti-colonialist) commentary attached in subtle, complex ways. Ford’s former
teacher, Stephen Katz, notes in the book “Walton Ford: Tigers of Wrath, Horses
of Instruction” that Ford’s main theme is “the frequently-disastrous
consequences of man’s encounters with animals,” which is congruous with Quammen’s work as well.
Ford’s works—at least, as reproduced
in books; I haven’t had the real-life pleasure yet—are beautiful, violent,
sexual, doomed, satirical. It’s a total delight reading him talking about and recontextualizing his main inspiration and nemesis,
Audubon, whom he regards as “a total dick…and not even that good an artist,” a
man whose name became a byword for nature depiction and preservation despite
his penchant for blowing away animals for fun, a man he recounts as killing an
eagle with a steel spike through the heart after charcoal fumes failed so he
could draw its corpse, a man who drew passenger pigeons as “romantically
involved” with no acknowledgement that the species was being mass-slaughtered
to extinction at the time, a man whose obsession with birds was informed by his
mother’s pet monkey’s strangulation of a pet parrot.2
Ford is clearly a man after my own
heart. It’s a rarified experience for me to find a fellow spirit, especially
one with whom I connect on multiple points. I recently spent more than a week
in the jungles of the Amazon; somehow, I wasn’t surprised to learn that as a
young film student, Ford was captivated by Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath
of God,” one of the films that, perhaps perversely, helped stoked the emotions
that eventually led me there.
With these things in mind, I
returned to the jacket illustration for Quammen’s
book, which I now knew included a 1997 Ford painting. Now I noticed the flooded
fields aren’t Northern European; they’re palm-tree-studded rice paddies. Having
had the “Walton Ford” book to point it out, I now saw that some of the tiger’s
stripes are figurative, depicting scimitar-wielding warriors and Ho Chi Minh. I
now noticed Ford’s multitudinous penciled commentary, including, beneath the
book’s printed subtitle (how significant and bullying a placement), the
painting’s own title: “Thanh hoang,
getting stripes, A.D. 40-1997.”
The web site of the Vietnamese
embassy in Washington, D.C., explains this the best: “Every village worships
its Thanh hoang, the God of
the village, who protects and guides the whole village (the Vietnamese always honour [sic] the people who rendered distinguished services
for villagers or national heroes who were born and died in the village to be
their Thahn hoang).”
The modern book jacket or cover is
typically created by an in-house designer, or by a freelancer working within
guidelines created by one. The publisher’s marketing team usually has veto
power. The author typically doesn’t have any power.
That much I know. What I don’t know
is how real art gets recycled as jacket illustrations, and specifically whether
Ford pimps his own stuff or if that’s some money-man’s idea. I got stony
silence on the subject from publishers, designers, museums and the New York
gallery that reps Ford. The stonewalling is perhaps the most complete I’ve
encountered since I researched medicinal cocaine production, which tells me
something.
Ford lives not far from here and has
his studio even closer, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And Quammen’s phone number is laying right here on my desk. But
Ford is presumably making paintings and Quammen is
working on a new book about Darwin, and, in a very rare mood, I have little
desire to bother them with my whimsical questions if their money-handling
bodyguards won’t respond. Besides, the fax number I have for Ford didn’t work.
It’s a blessing in disguise to focus
instead on the intangibles that made this process of discovery so appealing to
me in the first place. I’ve never attached more significance than necessary to
coincidence, but its powerful appeal is on display here, as is the deeper,
actual patterns it can reveal; in this case, the hidden world of book
publishing art pimping.
And then there is the shadowplay of the work itself. Ford’s works are predicated
on being misunderstood; they are designed to appear like normal, if
anachronistic and sometimes slightly skewed, animal renderings, only revealing
their deeper points upon closer examination—upon the tendering of time, that
rarest of expenditures in today’s economy.
Book jackets are likewise designed
to lure with a superficial reading—with only the book itself rewarding further
study. Intentionally or not, the use of Ford’s “Thahn
hoang” on “Monster of God” is a brilliant stroke,
layered in meaning as the jacket is
layered meaning atop the book. The striking image hiding a complex reality
could be taken as the theme of Quammen’s writing as
well, as can the study in the confusing attempt to identify “predators” in
relation to ourselves in a time in which we clearly are the ultimate predators.
And, in the end, the exploitation of Ford’s work as a book
jacket mirrors the exploitation of predators as macho symbols; it’s employed as
the paper equivalent of a tiger-skin rug. One of the many fascinating
subsections of Quammen’s book deals with the
philosophy that Australian crocodiles can be saved as a species only if they
are farmed and exploited in a controlled environment, an economy that seems to
embrace artists as well.
I’ve long said (after Bradbury and before Michael Moore)
that we’re living in a kind of “Fahrenheit 450” in which our minds and spirits
are threatened not by restricted information, but by a raving welter of it,
with faddish publicity as the only tool of discrimination and commercial
exploitation as the overriding message within the media. Twenty-four-hour news
has made us less informed, the Internet has become an improved shopping
mall-cum-porn shop, and truly interesting things continue to fall through the
cracks—even if they’re smaller cracks these days.
It could be argued I’d have never heard of Ford if it wasn’t
for commercial exploitation, or noticed him if his work hadn’t been pimped as jacket
art not once but twice. I would argue I should have known him anyway; I should
have seen the art before I saw it as a book illustration.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how I found Ford; the delight
is that I did. But there’s something undeniably frustrating about the
commercial fog I had to grope through to do so, a sense that I solved a mystery
the solution to which was that there is no mystery, just confusion produced as
a waste product of publicity. I looked for weeks at a philosophical friend, yet,
well-trained by culture to expect superficiality, almost didn’t see him. In a
society built on everyone selling themselves to everybody else, I wonder if the
fate of Ford’s painting isn’t our own, and I have dark suspicions about the
identity of our homegrown Thahn hoang.
1
The 2000 hardcover edition published by Alfred A. Knopf.
2
As quoted in the PBS TV series “Art in the Twenty-First Century”; “Nature Boy,”
New York Magazine, Oct. 21, 2002; and “Walton Ford” by Dodie
Kazanjian and Stephen Katz.
A significant
source not cited in the text is “Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover
Design” by Alan Powers. Posted Oct. 9, 2005.