#thomas leclair

      In a 2010 interview with Dan Nadel and Brian Chippendale, the following exchange occurred:

Dan Nadel: “One thing that people talk about a lot with your comics is the sense of design and fashion. There’s a huge focus on, like, costumes and exactly what they’re wearing and the kinds of structures that they’re entering and how those structures impact and reflect their lives. So how much time do you spend creating these architectures and these designs and things like that?”

Christopher Forgues: “I just can’t help it because, um, I just despise clothes and buildings and, uh, I just want to be a little bit comfortable with what I’m looking at. And I have a desire inside, this natural desire to, um, see things that I’m not seeing. So it’s just part of a general campaign to…”

Brian Chippendale: “New outfit campaign.”

Christopher Forgues: [laughing] Yeah, to like, just to survive, aesthetically, spiritually.”

      Forgues’ brief statements here are, I believe, central to his artistic practice, and remind me of those of the author William H. Gass in his 1977 interview with Thomas LeClair: “If someone asks me, ‘Why do you write?’ I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next question, ‘Why do you write the way you do?’ I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part.”

      In his revealing 2009 interview with Robin McConnell of Inkstuds Radio, Forgues also speaks of “young hate”.

      Many have pointed out, in opposition to hollow and non-philosophical aphorisms about love, that meaningful love (at least in cases when love is passionate and involves commitment rather than the dispassionate and often aloof universal compassion of non-bodhisattvaic arhats) engenders hate: hate for all that hurts or threatens the belovèd. (A bodhisattva, for instance, hates ignorance and needless suffering, even if her love of conscious creatures is universal.) Forgues’ reply attests to the converse situation—that of hate instilling love.

      There’s a passage from “The Art of Qur’an Calligraphy” by Martin Lings that sheds light on this phenomenon: “Arabs’ disinclination to write down precious words had no doubt a very positive part to play in the genesis of Arabic calligraphy. These people were in love with the beauty of their language and with the beauty of the human voice. There was absolutely no common measure between these two summits on the one hand and the ungainliness of the only available script on the other. Their disdain for writing showed a sense of values; and in light of final results it is legitimate to suppose that it was the reverse side of an openness to calligraphic inspiration, as much as to say, ‘Since we have no choice but to write down the Revelation, then let that written record be as powerful an experience for the eye as the memorized record is for the ear when the verses are spoken or chanted’.”

      Forgues does not shy away from the negative but sees it as a fecund source, not only of meaning, but also of beauty. In a “Proust Questionnaire” for PictureBox Inc., which seems to have been removed from the Internet (others will still perhaps remember it, as I do), Forgues spoke of being inspired by Georges Bataille, in whose thought negativity is central—not only in a technical sense (negation, etc.) but in a vernacular, evocative sense related to horror, tragedy, etc.

      Instances of such Bataillean concepts as base materialism and the limit-experience can be found in a number of Forgues’ works. In the aforementioned Inkstuds interview, speaking of Powr Mastrs, Forgues said: “To a certain extent I’m not really sure what it’s for, except to talk about things that are hard to name. Mostly it’s just about the mysteries of human ability, capability, the mysteries of… I don’t know, just unknown energies, blank energies—and a lot of times that means scary energies, things that you don’t know […] That’s the scariest thing: the unknown. So it’s a little bit about that: facing the unknown. And each character in their own way is rising to or shrinking from that challenge in different ways; they’ve all developed these […] elegant or brutish ways of responding to those problems.”