12: "Johnny Monomyth" by Bert Stabler and Noah Berlatsky (Friday, July 17)

"The text of Johnny Monomyth, written by my friend Noah Berlatsky, involved a careful and fairly seamless satirical appropriation of visionary capitalist writing from the end of the millennium. My artwork attempted to similarly appropriate motifs of classic modernist design, but my primary inspiration was the drawings of Oskar Schlemmer, and, in particular, his plans for a stage theater of mechanized puppets in which the lead characters tower over the scene in physical size. The three main characters of the Johnny Monomyth story (the hero, the villain, the love interest) can only be seen when the pages of the comic are cut out and assembled into a large grid-- the grid being, of course, a key reference point for visual modernism. The flowchart aesthetic derives from a perhaps neo-Platonist humanist mysticism of energy and movement vectors subsumed into an idealized architectural cosmos, a paradigm Schlemmer shared with other Bauhaus luminaries, particularly Klee and Moholy-Nagy." -- Albert Stabler

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Bert Stabler bio: www.bertstabler.com
Noah Berlatsky bio: http://www.blogger.com/profile/07224228101183148043

To find out more about "Johnny Monomyth," click here: http://www.artofthemix.org/monomyth/index.asp.