atrick Phipps doesn’t appear in the revue J&L Illustrated #11 and it’s surely an accident because most of his peers are there, David Shrigley, Marcel Dzama, Craig Taylor, Oskar Korsar, Dame Darcy and the others. Where is this sudden eruption of incontinent doodlers coming from? Is it a sign of the times – that graffiti has left the walls of the city (thanks Mr. Giuliani) to invade the notebooks and proliferate right into the galleries? The Blog generation lets its cerebral matter drip from its pencil points. Well made heads, full to the exploding point, the umpteenth Renaissance, the “noble” arts and the trivial sources of Impressionism and Pop stirred into lumpy mashed potatoes, appetizing, innocent (in appearance), adolescent. The references, quotations, allusions, are innumerable, inexhaustible, become the name of the game, its propulsion or gasoline: it’s the reign of Google culture. Moth-eaten mythologies (Bushido, Kung-fu, Motörhead, Mott the Hoople, Starwars & werewolves); disorderly, suavely desperate name-dropping (Bunuel, Matthew Barney, Malevitch sponsored by Chevrolet); pop without poppers; post-coïtal post-modernism; funny pages2 and bad French (that fantastic “Dieu Pain” in lieu of “Pan God”, those triumphant “Putain (de) sa mère” and “Plus Vites !”); the snotty questions (“What’s so fucking great about Dylan anyway?”) of thirty-somethings, their perspectives blocked, at the baying of a generation of fifty-somethings who refuse to die or lay down their arms. Sworn to benign thoughts, fractured assaults, historically denied adding ideologies. And the grandeur, precisely, is in the fracturing, in being condemned to the infinitesimal. The force comes from the apparent innocuousness. It’s kudzu, this work, a whole civilization being slowly, insidiously, surrounded, swamped, strangled. And for this civilization to die is exactly what we want, for it to finish in this delicious debris, in the sketchbooks of these adorable youngsters, artists beyond genres, beyond hierarchies; direct descendants of the ancient great ones Robert Crumb, Gary Panter (claimed overtly by our man Phipps3), nursling brothers of post 9-11 situationnist David Rees4; of Chris Ware, master of comics; of Marcel Dzama (quoted two times, cause he’s the Boss as was said of Braque5) and so many others who stone the world with their tiny graphic pebbles and who will end up, if one still believes a little bit in Art, by doing it in.
Jean-Luc Fromental (Paris)

Patrick Phipps
Nice Krisis
Published April 2004

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