By Emily K. Alhadeff, Associate Editor, The Jewish Sound
Art Spiegelman has a hard time explaining his new production. It’s “somewhere between intellectual vaudeville” and “a lecture run amok” inspired by woodcut novels, the musical genius of Phillip Johnston, and an opportunity to use the Sydney Opera House. Whatever it’s about, he said, “your brain will be cracked open.”
But for Spiegelman, the comics artist who became a household name for his “Maus” graphic novels about the Holocaust, words are not the only tool on hand. To that end, it’s fitting that his latest endeavor is called “Wordless.”
“It’s sort of about the war between words and pictures,” Spiegelman told JTNews by phone from New York. “What is it the pictures are doing? They’re not just decorations. They’re language. What happens when you use that language when you get rid of the words? With one hand tied behind its back, what can it still lift?”
According to the trailer, “Wordless” intends to leave you as “breathlessly unbalanced” as Spiegelman normally feels, teetering on the invisible hyphen between between words and pictures, high art and low art, serious and comic, time and space. The show consists of Spiegelman’s commentary to a slideshow of comics from early 20th-century comic artists and wordless novelists like Frans Masereel,
H.M. Bateman, Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel, Milt Gross, and Si Lewen. A live band led by jazz composer Phillip Johnston moves the show along.
“Wordless” comes to the Moore Theatre in Seattle October 12.
Spiegelman and Johnston’s artistic partnership dates back a number of years, when they worked on a musical production that never saw the light of day. Their connection was broken when Johnston
moved from New York to Australia — until one day, when Spiegelman was invited to participate in a live interview at the Sydney Opera House. The invitation didn’t appeal to him, but then he had a thought.
“‘You have an opera house. Can I use it?’” he asked. “After a pause they said, ‘Well, yes.’”
Spiegelman and Johnston got back to work creating a silent story facilitated by live music. The debut performance of what became “Wordless” received a standing ovation at the iconic opera house.
“I was high for about half an hour afterwards,” Spiegelman recalled.
Then it hit him: Now what?
Upon his return to New York, Spiegelman arranged for four more performances last winter, leading to the eight-city tour across the United States this October.
The response has been positive, he said.
“It crosses through comics, but it’s about something else,” he said. “It’s about thought and the way you think and the visual aspects that are making you feel something.”
Music takes the place of words by pointing to “emotional registers,” he said. “There’s a kind of richness to things that don’t get tied down by words. Words kind of staple things in place.”
Words are part of what got Spiegelman in trouble last month, when he criticized Israel on Facebook alongside side-by-side illustrations of David and Goliath. Using the artistic technique of forced perspective, in one panel David appears bigger than Goliath. His controversial statement received thousands more hits than his typical posts about art.
“Now I know the word ‘like’ can mean ‘I’ll kill you on sight,’” he said.
“People are so preprogrammed to have responses that there’s no perspective possible,” he said. “They just come up with their noses up against your face so there’s no room for 3D.”
Art, especially comics, is not immune to politics, and Spiegelman is no stranger to controversy.
“Part of making something in the world has a political dimension to it,” he said. “That has to come out in one way or another.”