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“Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhilarating new show opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, makes the case that through the mechanism of design, scientific advances of the last decade have at least opened the way to unexpected visual pleasures.
As revolutionary in its own way as MoMA’s “Machine Art” exhibition of 1934, which introduced Modern design to a generation of Americans, the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty. Like that earlier show, it is shaped by an unwavering faith in the transformative powers of technology.
Yet the exhibition’s overarching theme, the ability to switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities, may sound a death knell for the tired ideological divides of the last century, between modernity and history, technology and man, individual and collective. It should be required viewing for anyone who believes that our civilization is heading back toward the Dark Ages.
Any aficionado of early Mad comics published during the first half of the 1950s, when Mad was still a riotous comic book and not yet a formatted magazine, will recognize the brilliantly perverse parody of a Life magazine cover featuring a portrait of a hideous girl next to the headline “Beautiful Girl of the Month Reads Mad.” The artist who concocted this misshapen, bug-eyed, fang-toothed, pimply-faced, spaghetti-haired, pig-nosed monstrosity was Basil Wolverton (1909-78), a Mad mainstay who specialized in things ugly. He created Lena the Hyena, a character who appeared in Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” and was known as “the ugliest woman in Lower Slobbovia.” And he was the mastermind behind “Powerhouse Pepper,” a mock-heroic melodrama, as well as covers for GJDRKZLXCBWQ Comics: A Gallery of Gooney Gags and DC Comics’ Mad-like Plop! Always recognizable for unbridled grotesquerie, his art ran the gamut from political satire (“Candid Close-Ups: Hitler”) to goofy science fiction (“Rocket Rider”) to biblical illustrations (for a decade he wrote and illustrated the Bible story, serialized in The Plain Truth magazine, for the Worldwide Church of God). His epic in this last genre was a gory interpretation of Armageddon, complete with horrific atomic aftermaths. He did, however, also produce posters for Topps, the trading card company. While his penchant for extreme physical exaggeration may not have been to everyone’s taste, through Mad he exercised incalculable influence on the history of comics and the perceptions of impressionable preteens, like me. “Gross” was and remains a generational code.images official site
via vz / special thanks to s doughton for putting a name to this special iconic weirdo for me back in the 80's