Q&A with Zak Smith discussion

I was quite taken with the detail of this particular portrait, having loved that particular epoch of Marvel comics and can see at least two copies of "The New Mutants" - I always wanted to find those comics to examine how you had essentially captured them - and how you had not captured them - because I thought that might blow me away - if, ha, you could tell me what issues those happen to be, I'm sure I could pull them up - supposing you could know. I enjoy that picture's "controlled chaos" - all those disparate elements that I think enhance the portrait. Further, where they her comic books, or yours? Were these just what happened to be lying about, or were the objects chosen with forethought?

Also, are there any writers on art that you find particularly influential/attractive? I myself have been quite fond of Dave Hickey, still alive, and John Ruskin, quite dead, and Samuel Beckett, also dead.

I'd meant to drop in earlier, but other duties press.

Thank you for adding me.

In the portrait of Xi'an--those are her comics. And yes, it is a weird coincedence that there is a vietnamese girl named Xi'an in some of those comics--well, she liked them maybe because of that. anyway, they are early issues from the 80s--don;t know exactly which ones--check around the Demon Bear Saga.

I never read Ruskin or Beckett on art.

As for Hickey: well, he's still alive and writing about art for a living, so there's no way you can trust anything I say about him in a public forum.

The theory people I like best are John Paul Sartre and David Thomson--who writes about film. He doesn't pay much attention to the visuals, but his writing about actors is priceless.

In either of them, which passage made you think they had something worth saying - which passages within them do you return to, if you return at all, to re-appraise? To say, "What the hell was he talking about?" or, alternately, "What the hell was I thinking?" Or, to say, "Yes, that's it. Precisely it. Still." Or not.

David Thomson's entry on Ronald Reagan is pretty dead on. From his "biographical dictionary of film". Sartre's essay on St. George, likewise.


Oh, also, Borges, in his "Prologues To A Personal Library"