Doodleganza at the MCA

I got to the MCA early without checking to see what new work they were showing. I wanted to be surprised, like when you go out of your way not to learn anything about a movie you know you want to see, so you can be atwitter with anticipation. After wandering through Liam Gillick's Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario installation, an expanse of negative space traversed by huge prison-or-enclosure-like structures echoing with pulsing, mechanically repetitive instrumental guitar crunch rock, however, I was feeling overwhelmed, like I'd stumbled onto a set built for an avant-garde stage production of Repo Man starring actors of inhumanly gigantic proportions. I felt tiny! I sat in the cavernous Puck Cafe nibbling a $5 Rice Krispie Treat feeling bullied by contemporary art, thinking that Liam Gillick had probably wanted me to feel that way, and wishing I could ask him what I did to make him so mad at me. There was really no way, I realized, for me to respond to this work and its creator personally at all.
This was all very discouraging.
"The aesthetics of social structures and consumption and the estrangement of the viewer/spectator are like, super significant themes in contemporary art," I thought, "But if only someone would think of a way for contemporary art to also be participatory, accessible, and fun..." Then I noticed it was almost 6:00, time to walk across to the other side of the Puck Cafe for Doodleganza hosted by Ezra Claytan Daniels, and realized that since the Puck Cafe is huge enough to probably double as a stadium for at least one kind of professional sport, I had better get moving.

"Doodleganza" is a new name for something that's actually been around since 2004, Claytan Daniels' Comic Art Battle, which has been held at all kinds of events and locations in the past, and has featured such mighty contenders as Marvel vs. DC and Chicago vs. Portland duking it out doodle-style for improvised comic glory. The MCA's Doodleganza features local Chicago artists, and this month's battle pitted artists Thorne Brandt (aka Team Pizza) and Christa Donner (aka Team Thunder) against each other for the title. Here's what it looks like: long tables covered with all sizes, shapes and varieties of paper, pens, markers, and pencils, like a Nordic Mead Hall with drawing! That's where the audience/participants sit. Up front, two easels holding big pads of white paper and our two team captains. Claytan Daniels explains the first challenge, a combination of Mad Lib, improv, and lightning-fast comic art. The audience calls out an adjective, a noun, and a verb--in this case, "slovenly," "aardvark," and "cuddling"--and it's on! The artists have five minutes to make it happen, after which the results are judged by the timeless and infallible Audience Applause-O-Meter method.

Now that we're all warmed up, it's time to jump in. Audience members contribute their own art as prompts for the challenges, and also stand up and collaborate with Team Captains; in one challenge, Donner and Brandt, each with one collaborator, have five minutes to execute a three-panel comic strip from an audience member's written script. The result: sumo wrestlers debating the Flat Earth Theory whilst free-floating in outer space versus a mop telling a knock knock joke to a turd in a baseball cap! In another, participants have been asked to conceive either a superhero or supervillain, with strengths and weaknesses, and the two teams beat the clock to design the best nemeses for these characters.

The super villain Señor Peñut

In the final Battle Royale, Team Captains and audience members team up again for all-out mayhem on one big piece of paper, with five minutes to draw the winning side of a battle between two armies called out by the audience. This week, Ballerinas versus the Kiss Army meant plenty of pirouette tornado kicks and axe chops in a rain of red Sharpie-spattered black leather and pink tulle!

After the smoke cleared, Thorne Brandt and Team Pizza emerged victorious, a 3 1/2 to 2 1/2 point win--at least until next month's contenders step into the ring. As for me, I left feeling totally inspired! It was like Liam Gillick stole my lunch money, but then Ezra Claytan Daniels, Christa Donner, and Thorne Brandt all shared their Hostess Apple Pies with me.

Peñut's nemesis, his disapproving father

In all seriousness, folks...we know that the ways in which the contemporary art viewer's dynamic role in the creative process has intersected with ideas about consumerism and spectator society are many, and the thematic avenues by which these relationships may be explored in contemporary art are infinite. We've all read our Foucault. And here in the twenty first century, it's possible we may reside in a new, unique cultural space of meta-disconnectedness, in which we are not only intrinsically disengaged but are also academically aware of our own disengagement. Part of what Doodleganza/Comic Art Battle represented, for me, was making the accomplishment of a difficult task look deceptively easy--the re-engagement of the viewer/consumer and the re-casting of the spectator as participant in the creative process, which becomes even more interesting when considered in relation to the MCA's collection.

But we all also know that if you deconstruct something, it's not funny anymore, and the best and most obvious reason to go to Doodleganza is because it's really, really fun. So bring your friends, bring your chops, and get ready to step into the ring. Let's get it on!!!!

-Originally appeared in November 2009 on the blog of the Chicago Underground Library. If you didn't catch this when it was at the MCA, you missed a good time! Would love to see a Comic Art Battle return to Chicago soon.