From âMeditations on the Art of CFâ by Windham Hazelhurst a.k.a. James D Bowman 3:
     In a 2010 interview with Dan Nadel and Brian Chippendale, the following exchange occurred:
Dan Nadel: âOne thing that people talk about a lot with your comics is the sense of design and fashion. Thereâs a huge focus on, like, costumes and exactly what theyâre wearing and the kinds of structures that theyâre 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?â
Christopher Forgues: âI just canât help it because, um, I just despise clothes and buildings and, uh, I just want to be a little bit comfortable with what Iâm looking at. And I have a desire inside, this natural desire to, um, see things that Iâm not seeing. So itâs just part of a general campaign toâŠâ
Brian Chippendale: âNew outfit campaign.â
Christopher Forgues: [laughing] Yeah, to like, just to survive, aesthetically, spiritually.â
     Forguesâ 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: âIf someone asks me, âWhy do you write?â 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, âWhy do you write the way you do?â I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part.â
     In his revealing 2009 interview with Robin McConnell of Inkstuds Radio, Forgues also speaks of âyoung hateâ.
     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 belovĂšd. (A bodhisattva, for instance, hates ignorance and needless suffering, even if her love of conscious creatures is universal.) Forguesâ reply attests to the converse situationâthat of hate instilling love.
     Thereâs a passage from âThe Art of Qurâan Calligraphyâ by Martin Lings that sheds light on this phenomenon: âArabsâ 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, âSince 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 chantedâ.â
     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 âProust Questionnaireâ 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 centralânot 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 Forguesâ works. In the aforementioned Inkstuds interview, speaking of Powr Mastrs, Forgues said: âTo a certain extent Iâm not really sure what itâs for, except to talk about things that are hard to name. Mostly itâs just about the mysteries of human ability, capability, the mysteries of⊠I donât know, just unknown energies, blank energiesâand a lot of times that means scary energies, things that you donât know [âŠ] Thatâs the scariest thing: the unknown. So itâs 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; theyâve all developed these [âŠ] elegant or brutish ways of responding to those problems.â
     The series seems to me to reflect Batailleâs notion that âLife is whole only when it isnât subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.â















