For comic-book artist Ben Katchor, words and image are part of the same spectrum
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 1, 2000) -- For Ben Katchor, a picture without a text induces anxiety. It’s too unformed or vaguely suggestive or unreadable. It needs an explanation. Which is why ever since he was a teen-ager, Katchor has created comic strips.

But don’t go looking for Katchor’s comic books with Batman and Superman at the corner newsstand. While Katchor’s work is partly inspired by the superhero comics he read as a boy, it is also work of a wholly different order, work that has as much in common with James Joyce, say, as with Spiderman. And instead of being populated with superhuman characters, Katchor’s strips mine the quotidian reality of urban life.

As such, Katchor www.katchor.com strips like “Hotel and Farm” and “Cardboard Valise” are found in urban newspapers and magazines such as the Forward, Metropolis, and dozens of others in which they are syndicated. They are also collected in several published volumes, including “The Jew of New York,” “Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay,” and his latest, “The Beauty Supply District,” which collects strips from perhaps his best known series, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.”

This past year, however, Katchor’s comics found themselves in an entirely new arena, when the new-music collaborative Bang on a Can teamed with Katchor and the experimental Ridge Theater to bring Katchor’s words and pictures to life in “The Carbon Copy Building,” a multimedia, comic-book opera.

The innovative production, winner of the Village Voice’s 2000 OBIE award for Best New American Work, will be presented in the Hunter Center for the Performing Arts at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams on Friday and Saturday nights (Aug. 4-5) at 8. In a related event, Katchor will also present “Carfare City,” a slide show/lecture about a unique utopian municipal plan, at Mass MoCA tonight (Aug. 3rd) at 8.

The comic-book opera had its genesis in a commission Bang on a Can received from the Settembre Musica Festival in Italy. The work, which received its U.S. premiere last fall at the Kitchen, a downtown New York performing space, is based on a single strip of the same name which ran in Metropolis. The strip illustrated the architectural phenomenon of the carbon copy building, in which, according to Katchor, a developer pulls out an old blueprint and builds the same building on another parcel.

"This is something that every architect knows about," said Katchor in a recent phone interview from his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. "There are these buildings all over the world. The dramatic complication in the strip is that sixty-nine years after these two buildings go up, one ends up in a perfectly preserved state in an affluent neighborhood, while the other ends up in the Bent Spoon District, the cheap commercial part of town, where the building has been renovated so many times that there’s nothing left of the original."

As anyone who is familiar with Katchor’s work will attest, it is sometimes hard to know where reality ends and Katchor’s imagination begins, or vice-versa. His true-to-life narratives - and one uses the term narrative loosely, as very little if anything ever really happens in his strips - are stuffed with compulsively wrought details, from the signs and labels on every building and object to the crowded urban landscapes strewn with the enigmatic minutiae of daily life.

"The idea of bringing the word and the image together again after they had been sort of separated through the refinement of both arts was something that had always interested me," said Katchor, a one-time Guggenheim Fellow who recently won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award valued at $500,000. "So I stud ied painting and writing and thought that there’s this continuum of representation from the image to the word, and they can sort of meet somewhere in between. That’s sort of where comics are."

When working on “Carbon Copy Building,” Katchor, Ridge Theater artistic director Bob McGrath, and the trio of composers who comprise Bang on a Can - Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe - strived to recreate the experience of reading a comic book in the production of the opera.

"The whole idea of doing a comic-book opera was to find a way to integrate text into the visuals," said Katchor. "Instead of just using supertitles, to really make it as part of the design of the show. Because when you look at a comic book, you’re looking at an image and text.
It’s a tricky thing to do. It’s a lot to take in. There are people who when they hear a word they see a color - that strange, psychological sort of weird, crossed circuit. Well, every moment of this show your circuits are crossed. You’re hearing music, you’re looking at a picture, and you’re reading words. It’s pretty dense because of that. And there are moments - amazing moments of visual, auditory and linguistic combinations -- where it works in a really amazing way that I don’t think you could have planned."

The opera is designed so that Katchor’s picture-story panels - replete with voice balloons and narrative -- are the sets, enlarged and layered through slide and video projection techniques. A cast of four actors - Theo Bleckmann, Tony Boutte, Katie Geissinger and Toby Twining - sing Katchor’s text, with music written by Bang on a Can and performed by a quartet. As is typical of Bang on a Can’s style, if a collective of composers can be said to have one style, the music is highly rhythmic and percussive, with echoes of progressive rock and new-classical minimalism.

How a one-page comic strip featuring 18 panels becomes a 75-minute opera might be a little hard to imagine. “There are lines in the libretto, or a single line, that if I did it as a comic strip it’d be a single panel, but here it’s expanded into a five-minute scene,” said Katchor. "So things took on a different weight than I’d imagined. In most cases I liked that, because they go into the depth of that line in a way I wouldn’t have done or wouldn’t have been able to do."

The addition of music to his work was also a revelation. "When something is very well set to music, it’s transforming," said Katchor. "It had this transforming effect on the words. There are so many images in each scene, but the music is this whole layer of emotion which is pretty complex. The best moments of the show are when there’s this strange confluence of image and music and word."

As for his “Carfare City” slide show tonight, Katchor said it is based on a scheme by a visionary architect in the Julius Knipl series who wanted to build a development within the city called Carfare City. "It’s a very dense, multi-layered structure combining thousands of residential units and businesses, but they’re all interconnected by an electric streetcar system. The streetcar runs through every living and business space according to a schedule. So the public and private aspects of life are sort of intertwined in a strange way."

Getting back to his discomfort with the naked image, Katchor said, "There’s this Jewish sort of suspicion of the unexplained image. There’s something about an image without a commentary that sort of bothers me. You don’t really know how to read it. And to say that the commentary is the cultural critic writing about it -- then why not put it into the thing itself, not as an explanation but as part of the actual meaning of the thing?

"That’s the only way that I can see it suits me. I’m interested in both writing and drawing, and I don’t think it has to be one or the other. So I bring them together because there’s this strange continuity. They’re at different ends of this spectrum of description. One is a representation stripped down to a symbol or some kind of abstraction, and one is a representation that’s clothed in all the little details of the concrete world.

"In that continuum of meaning I like this place in between. Play the word off the image or the words in the image. I don’t know. I just don’t see why they should be separated."

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 3, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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