{"id":103750,"date":"2016-10-17T11:33:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T15:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103750"},"modified":"2016-10-17T12:47:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T16:47:51","slug":"here-comes-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/17\/here-comes-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Here Comes the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hopeful dystopia of Pushwagner\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Soft City.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From Soft City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Where does art begin? In the case of Soft City<\/a>, <\/em>the straightforward answer is this: it began in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1969, in a sea captain\u2019s house converted into a writer\u2019s retreat by the novelist Axel Jensen, after Pushwagner had ingested Sandoz LSD. He doodled a man in a car, whom he intuited was called \u201cMr. Soft\u201d\u2014five years before Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel would have a hit song of that name\u2014and, along with Jensen, envisioned a day-in-the-life narrative structure for the character, along the lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn\u2019s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich <\/em>and James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses. <\/em>And then?<\/p>\n

A hiatus of some three years (hardly the only sharp left turn in Pushwagner\u2019s tumultuous life), during which time he lived on virtually nothing in London (subsisting by selling drawings on trains for pennies) and Oslo, went back to his mother\u2019s, was arrested for trying to board a flight to Madeira on his hands and knees, was institutionalized, walked back to Fredrikstad, escaped a hotel in Paris, sojourned in Lisbon, returned to London, and became a father. After these adventures, he once again began Soft City, <\/em>with, he\u2019s said, his beloved baby daughter, Elizabeth, on his lap, and with thoughts of the future in mind. Mr. Soft now had a family of his own, and a fearful projected dystopia to live in. Pushwagner finished the book, or rather the 269 bleak yet blackly comic ink drawings that would comprise it, in 1975; and then, after a few luminaries of the London music world had admired it (including Pete Townshend and Steve Winwood), he lost it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Frustratingly, no definitive statement exists on how. For a reasonable surmise, put together Pushwagner\u2019s claim that his \u201cwhole portfolio\u201d was stolen when he moved back to Oslo in 1979 and his biographer Petter Mejl\u00e6nder\u2019s assertion that Soft City <\/em>was lost when he returned to Norway. In 2002, Mejl\u00e6nder goes on, it was \u201crecovered\u201d\u2014though somewhere along the way, while living rough, Pushwagner had signed away the rights to all of his work, an act that required lengthy legal untangling later\u2014and the book was finally published in 2008. Time, though, had by no means withered Pushwagner\u2019s blackly satirical worldview: in some ways quite the reverse.<\/p>\n

Yet the book didn\u2019t really <\/em>start there, insofar as no work of art truly originates in the moment of its physical making. New parenthood appears to have pushed Soft City <\/em>down an anxious road to completion\u2014as, at approximately the same time, the same experience did for David Lynch\u2019s Eraserhead\u2014<\/em>but the track was likely marked and lit already. In Pushwagner\u2019s case there are two intersecting backstories: the complicated, painful, and raggedly glorious circumstances of his own life, and the larger history of modernist idealism and its great unraveling in the second half of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Pushwagner\u2019s relationship with draftsmanship itself is inseparable from trauma, and might even be construed as an escape hatch from it: he learned to draw\u2014from his father\u2014while recovering from being hit by a bus at the age of four. This accident he blames on a mysterious goading figure called \u201cthe Bogeyman,\u201d who Pushwagner says has haunted him throughout his life and whose actual existence we might step gingerly around. Pushwagner\u2019s mother would leave the family when he was eight, and his father\u2019s ensuing rule over him made his life, to quote the artist, \u201chell.\u201d If one can forgive a little amateur psych, it might not seem a coincidence that Pushwagner, in his late twenties, would begin drawing a narrative that features both a united nuclear family\u2014albeit one where the parents are drugged into sleepwalking through life\u2014and a male authority figure ruling over a world of bureaucratic tedium. (Pushwagner and his father also lived in close proximity to a dull civil servant.)<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Pushwagner and his daughter in Wales, 1981. Photo: Pushwagner.<\/p><\/div>\n

And consider, not unrelated to all of this, what Pushwagner\u2019s self-experimentation, and the turbulent era in which he came of age, had done to rewire his mind in preparation for creating Soft City. <\/em>The man born Terje Brofos in 1940\u2014he would not rename himself Hariton Pushwagner until the early 1970s\u2014had, by the time he began this book, banked a decade of freewheeling bohemianism. After formal art studies in Oslo, he\u2019d gone to Paris as a teenager and met the jazz pianist Bud Powell. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he\u2019d been in Tangier and San Francisco and Beirut (where, improbably, he met Cliff Richard in a nightclub), delightedly encountered Picasso in Ibiza, and in London dated a Vogue <\/em>model, befriended R. D. Laing, and met that other temporary resident of Tangier, William Burroughs. And, fatefully, in 1968, in a toilet in Oslo\u2019s \u201cArtist\u2019s House,\u201d he had run into the novelist Axel Jensen, whose stories of disaffected young men had made him a Norwegian equivalent of Jack Kerouac, though he would soon gearshift into the science fiction for which he is best known. Jensen, whom Pushwagner had admired since childhood, was looking for a way to market his books to a wider audience, perhaps via visual imagery. Their collaboration\u2014and their not unrelated forays into using psychedelic drugs\u2014began here.<\/p>\n

Direct influences on Soft City <\/em>that we might disinter from all this undoubtedly include Burroughs, whose 1961 novel The Soft Machine\u2014<\/em>the title referring to the human body and its susceptibility to systems of control\u2014employed his and Brion Gysin\u2019s \u201ccut-up\u201d technique. The inhabitants of Soft City <\/em>read newspapers whose headlines are cut-up medleys of sex, violence, and multiple languages (notably, in this quietly totalitarian state, German). The thoughts and language of the Controller (e.g., \u201cAtomize ist de trix!\u201d), who also has a German chauffeur, feel like cut-ups, too, products of a mind scrambled by even higher powers. What Pushwagner does with Burroughs\u2019s influence here is, seemingly, to send it into a future where its own revolutionary and avant-garde nature has been co-opted, made to serve the forces of production.<\/p>\n

More largely, the blazing diagrammatic clarity of Pushwagner\u2019s art in Soft City <\/em>feels analogous to what Burroughs famously called, in relation to 1959\u2019s Naked Lunch, <\/em>\u201cthe frozen moment when everybody sees what\u2019s on the end of every fork\u201d: parting the veils of manufactured consensus concerning how the world works. Soft City <\/em>is at once a glimpse of a dreadful future and an analysis-cum-exaggeration of the present-day tendencies that might, if left unchecked, lead to it. Without romanticizing drug use, this envisioning is something we might ascribe at least in part to Pushwagner\u2019s socialization-shattering use of LSD and, perhaps, paranoia brought on by his heavy smoking of hashish at the time\u2014a paranoiac being, as Burroughs also said, someone in possession of all the facts. In Soft City, <\/em>conversely, narcotics are no longer a road to mental freedom, they\u2019re agents of administration. The \u201cLife\u201d pill\u2014mandatory amphetamine?\u2014wakes the unknowing slaves up every morning, and the \u201cSleep\u201d pill knocks out their lights at end of day.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

From Soft City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

And it is <\/em>the end of the day, metaphorically speaking, in Soft City<\/em>\u2019s geometric world of subjugated worker bees. Or rather the end of days: it\u2019s presumably no accident that the last word in the book is \u201cgoodbye.\u201d Petter Mejl\u00e6nder has written that Soft City <\/em>\u201cdelineates nothing less than the final day, the day when everything disintegrates and falls apart, with no one observing the warning signs \u2026 the suicide of our civilization.\u201d The book was begun in 1969, the year when\u2014in the grim wake of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Manson murders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, et cetera\u2014by common consensus the counterculture fell apart, authority consolidated, and hopes for revolution were visibly dashed on the rocks.<\/p>\n

The depressive fallout would cloud the ensuing years. As the sun rises over the monstrous apartment building at Soft City<\/em>\u2019s beginning, the phrase \u201chere comes \u2026 the sun\u201d appears. But the Beatles, former lodestars of hopefulness, released that song as they were acrimoniously splitting up, the sun in Pushwagner\u2019s world is now an overseeing eye in the sky, and \u201cYesterday\u201d has become pacifying supermarket Muzak, mirroring the way in which, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the counterculture would be cannily resold to the masses as a safe but fashionable lifestyle choice.<\/p>\n

Nor are these the only once-hopeful aspects that have gone into reverse. The inhuman systematized metropolis of Soft City <\/em>is the brutal endpoint of architectural modernism as a form of social engineering, which might be said to have begun in 1905, when Auguste Perret first proposed skyscrapers for Paris. It got moving in earnest, though, via the visions of Le Corbusier, who began the first of his plans for largescale housing in 1922, desiring that his \u201cmachines for living\u201d ameliorate the condition of the working classes. The Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City) of that year was a radical urban design featuring sixty-story skyscrapers; the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) he blueprinted two years later was shaped like a human body, wholly rationalized and regimented. Le Corbusier\u2019s aesthetic arguably took no account of human needs, and while it was only realized limitedly on a citywide scale\u2014see L\u00facio Costa\u2019s Brasilia (1966), with its cross-axial butterfly plan and central highway lined with supersized residential blocks\u2014its influence would trickle down, in the decades to come, to everywhere that tower blocks sprang up; which is to say, most places.<\/p>\n

By 1975, the year that Pushwagner completed Soft City<\/em>, J. G. Ballard was publishing High-Rise<\/em>, a portrait of tower-block inhabitants inventing their own catastrophic morality, suggestive of how urbanism might not improve its inhabitants but remake them in the worst way. And, indeed, there were many examples by then of modernist social housing causing more problems than it solved. In 1972, the lawless and ruined Pruitt-Igoe housing project in Saint Louis, Missouri\u2014birthplace of Burroughs\u2014had been partly demolished, and Charles Jencks famously hailed this event as the death knell for modernist architectural ambitions.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

The cover of Soft City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Soft City, <\/em>then, was produced amid a cultural reckoning. Its diagnosis runs parallel to alternative architectural thinking that includes Constant Nieuwenhuys\u2019s designs for a stasis-free, anticapitalist situationist city, New Babylon (1959\u20131974), in which automated work would leave its citizens free to alter their environments perpetually via modular architectural elements; and Archigram\u2019s proposal for Plug-In City (1964), a cellular design without buildings, just standardized units for citizens to float in and out of. These were not realistic proposals per se but rather reactions against the stifling nature of the rationalized modern city and the related project to make architecture an agent of control that ostensibly began in the mid-nineteenth century when Baron Haussmann carved Paris up into wide, straight boulevards, difficult to barricade, easy to fire down.<\/p>\n

Soft City, <\/em>to the extent that it\u2019s set in the future\u2014an open question\u2014does not anticipate architectural rigidity disappearing. It visualizes something more along the lines of Fritz Lang\u2019s Metropolis <\/em>(1927) or Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World <\/em>(1932), a realm of ordered enslavement and one where, in this case, the slaves don\u2019t even recognize themselves as such. If Metropolis <\/em>holds out the hope of revolution, Pushwagner by contrast was working after <\/em>the attempted revolution\u2014on the counterculture\u2019s part\u2014and had seen the result. The authorities, panicking, double down on violent reaction while simultaneously milking the zeitgeist for profit: as depressing a result as one might imagine, perhaps, except that Soft City <\/em>makes it look like playtime. For readers disappointed by the events of then-recent years, Pushwagner here proposes alertness. Things are bad, Soft City <\/em>avers, but they can always get worse.<\/p>\n

And yet the book is not a dismal experience, seamed as it is with irony and pictorial verve. Soft City <\/em>is the comic-book form pushed through the same kind of filter of mental transformation as R. Crumb\u2019s lysergic early strips for Zap Comix <\/em>(first published in 1968). Pushwagner\u2019s massively fastidious scenography\u2014his teeming supermarkets, endless rows of white-collar workers\u2019 desks, vast perspectival views of densely windowed apartment blocks\u2014is at once pleasurable to lose oneself in, fearsome in its amphetamine energy, frightening as an idea of reality, and comically scathing: an intricate no-way-out design in which even the sun is a spy. If we discount the baby, Bingo (named after a distraction for the masses), whose wide guileless eyes are a mirror of his mother\u2019s and who remains behind the cage bars of his crib, then the only glimmers of human subjectivity in Soft City <\/em>appear in a handful of thought balloons. Pictorial ones for commuting drones depict fantasies of tropical holidays, fishing, or being a jet pilot, while textual ones rising from the heads of the couple at home expose stunted inner monologues: a pair of question marks when they say good night, the wife thinking the husband an idiot at breakfast, the occasional scrambled bit of pseudo-Cartesian thought. The guttering flicker of mental freedom, in this world, is reserved for standardized fantasy, confusion, or hate.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Pushwagner, 2015. Photo: Jimmy Linus\/D2.<\/p><\/div>\n

What might be the positive takeaway, then, from Soft City, <\/em>aside from the idea that\u2014as one critic observed\u2014it is a salient \u201cwarning to society\u201d? It\u2019s too late for these poor citizens, Pushwagner implies, just as it was too late for would-be rebels like Winston Smith in George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>. Change, if it\u2019s coming at all, has to happen before this burlesque overlaps wholly with reality. Let\u2019s note, at this point, the artist\u2019s adopted name, Hariton Pushwagner\u2014taken up in London in the early 1970s when he was, says Mejl\u00e6nder, \u201con the verge of madness and suicide\u201d\u2014and what it might mean. \u201cPushwagner,\u201d his biographer suggests, is intended to refer to a \u201cpush wagon\u201d or shopping cart, and to the idea that people should fill up their carts with something other than consumerist goods. (Remember the abundantly brimming, Muzak-laced supermarkets that fuel the inhabitants of Soft City<\/em>.) That what goes in the cart should be something that reinforces an essential humanity\u2014care for others, entirely lacking in Soft City <\/em>itself\u2014is meanwhile implied by \u201cHariton,\u201d which fuses \u201cHari,\u201d deriving from \u201cHare Krishna,\u201d and an approving measure of weight.<\/p>\n

Consumer capitalism, you may have noticed, is still with us. But, forty years after its completion, Soft City<\/em>\u2019s significance has shifted, even as the book has become relevant anew. Pushwagner\u2019s urban aesthetics have turned metaphorical, since our metropolitan landscapes get less boxy all the time. The dismantling of geometric architectural modernism that seemingly began with the detonating of Pruitt-Igoe feels almost complete. Today\u2019s architecture is \u201csoft\u201d in two ways: it runs on so ware\u2014our environments are becoming progressively more \u201csmart,\u201d more wired, with architectural elements communicating with each other, anticipating our needs, keeping tabs on us. And it is formally dominated by curves and parametric patterning and may thus appear friendlier, more human. Yet this stylistic facelift is surely just another dissimulation, a feint: the world is more unequal than ever, with the ultrawealthy consolidating their power daily. Rather than via irascible directives and shows of might, power is\u00a0often expressed through what Joseph Nye termed, in his 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power<\/em>, \u201csoft power\u201d: the power of attraction and persuasion, the steel fist in the thick velvet glove.<\/p>\n

If we are enslaved today, we barely know it. If we live in a giant panopticon, we like it, because it happens while we\u2019re enjoying using our laptops, our social media, our so ware, and while we exist in a state of continual distraction imposed from above. Entertainment today is increasingly clearly a pacifier, an anesthetizer, a softener. Soft City, <\/em>in its own way, points to this: it reaches its closing strait with an image of Bingo shouting in his crib, followed by the phrase \u201cLook \/ Here Comes \/ The Moon\u201d and a panoramic view of the geometric homestead\u2014a surprising flashback, perhaps, to illustrated children\u2019s books like Margaret Wise Brown\u2019s bedtime story Goodnight Moon <\/em>(1947). Pushwagner\u2019s magnum opus, <\/em>one may think at this point, is nothing more or less than a massively warped children\u2019s story, a fable aimed at adults who themselves have been made childlike.<\/p>\n

So the moon rises like always at the story\u2019s end, and Pushwagner\u2019s lens pulls back to reveal inky starless heavens, the wider reality beyond the bars of the crib and the prison of the apartment block. It\u2019s the last thing we see before the artist\u2019s closing word: \u201cgoodbye,\u201d so much harsher than \u201cgoodnight.\u201d Art, in that it is made at all, is a gesture of hope, and\u2014for all its alarm\u2014this book is certainly that.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

Martin Herbert\u00a0is associate editor of<\/em> ArtReview and a regular contributor to<\/em> Artforum,<\/em>\u00a0Frieze,<\/em> and<\/em> Art Monthly. His monograph<\/em> Mark Wallinger was published in 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay appears as the afterword to\u00a0<\/em>Soft City<\/a>, available now from New York Review Comics. Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The hopeful dystopia of Pushwagner\u2019s\u00a0Soft City. Where does art begin? In the case of Soft City, the straightforward answer is this: it began in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1969, in a sea captain\u2019s house converted into a writer\u2019s retreat by the novelist Axel Jensen, after Pushwagner had ingested Sandoz LSD. He doodled a man in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1079,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[25146,16675,7282,7351,25161,1657,35,25150,3553,25159,25152,5931,12511,131,25160,2633,4163,17198,18073,13747,14918,12026,11683,10344,25041,25153,12888,228,8321,17811,1050,3104,25158,4524,25155,22659,4537,22484,6122,25149,25157,25154,22406,133,25162,25042,12879,25147,25148,25156,946,14737,25151,3741,12807,229],"class_list":["post-103750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich","tag-acid","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn","tag-archigram","tag-architecture","tag-art","tag-auguste-perret","tag-bingo","tag-brave-new-world","tag-charles-jencks","tag-cities","tag-city-life","tag-comics","tag-costant-nieuwenhuys","tag-david-lynch","tag-descartes","tag-draftsmanship","tag-dystopia","tag-eraserhead","tag-family-life","tag-fritz-lang","tag-goodnight-moon","tag-graphic-novels","tag-hariton-pushwagner","tag-high-rise","tag-housing-projects","tag-illustration","tag-j-g-ballard","tag-le-corbusier","tag-london","tag-lsd","tag-metropolis","tag-modernism","tag-modernist-architecture","tag-muzak","tag-naked-lunch","tag-new-york-review-comics","tag-norway","tag-petter-mejlaender","tag-pills","tag-pruitt-igoe","tag-psychedelics","tag-r-crumb","tag-situationism","tag-soft-city","tag-st-louis","tag-terje-brofos","tag-the-soft-machine","tag-towers","tag-ulysses","tag-urban-design","tag-ville-contemporaine","tag-william-burroughs","tag-work","tag-zap-comix"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hopeful Dystopia of Pushwagner\u2019s \u201cSoft City\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Martin Herbert looks at Pushwagner\u2019s trailblazing sixties-era graphic novel and the meaning of the haunting cityscape at its center.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/17\/here-comes-the-moon\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Here Comes the Moon by Martin Herbert\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 17, 2016 \u2013 The hopeful dystopia of Pushwagner\u2019s\u00a0Soft City.Where does art begin? 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