In Neva Mikulicz’s show at Anya Tish Gallery, “Declassified”, the artist addresses two distinct perennial subjects: paranoia and cheesy 1950s-60s science fiction. Both seem to be outgrowths of the Cold War. All those alien invasion movies from the 50s (The Thing From Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) were certainly informed by anticommunism. Fear of atomic holocaust fed into movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Them, The Blob, etc. All of this imagery and paranoia feeds into Mikulicz’s work.
This is Bob the Killer Robot, with a fuzzy drawing style with Prismacolor pencils. It is more funny than threatening, but the glow reinforces the paranoia.
Hmmm has a woman in a mid-century modern apartment watching flying saucers invading. This makes me think of Caetano Veloso’s song “London, London.” It has the following lyrics:
I'm wandering round and round, nowhere to go
I'm lonely in London, London is lovely so
I cross the streets without fear
Everybody keeps the way clear
I know, I know no one here to say hello
I know they keep the way clear
I am lonely in London without fear
I'm wandering round and round, nowhere to go
While my eyes go looking for flying saucers in the sky
Veloso wrote this while exiled in London in 1969. He and fellow pop star Gilberto Gil had been arrested by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1968 and exiled for three years. Veloso ends up dropped down in England and starts writing songs in English. (His English-language songs have a kind of nursery-rhyme feel because he was still learning the language.) Here was a man who had been arrested by the secret police a year earlier and was living in a free city where people can walk around “without fear.” But the paranoia lingers, and flying saucers are a metaphor for it. And they are a metaphor for Mikulicz in Hmmm. (The screen in the woman’s room is an embedded video.)
This is The Guardian of Forever, using even more prismacolors than in the other drawings; Mikulicz had to break out the color pencils for it. Star Trek fans might recall that the Guardian of Forever features predominantly in the 1967 episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. In that episode, the Guardian of Forever is an alien artifact that looks like a crudely-made stone donut, which Kirk and Spock use to travel back in time to 1930s Earth. In the TV show, the Guardian is ancient, and Mikulicz puts her Guardian among ancient Greek or Roman ruins.
Tyrannasodaus Rex pulls the science fiction back to Texas.
Our Return to the Moon is a lighthearted view of space travel. (Interestingly, there is a little known Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” in which the protagonist travels to the moon via a balloon.)
USSF vs. The Killer Robot brings the power of the military against a blocky old-fashioned robot. This picture has built in sound.
Most of Mikulicz’s drawings feature a metaphorical, ironic visions of paranoia and atomic attack. But Atomic Veterans reminds us that for many people, it wasn’t a metaphor. The soldiers who were involved in A bomb and H bomb tests were real. They had to march towards the mushroom clouds. As Mikulicz writes in the accompanying publication, “The troops in my drawing have more protection than most of the men.”
This is an image from 1957’s Operation Plumbob, taken from the website Atomic Heritage Foundation.
To accompany the show, Anya Tish Gallery published a slick, comic-book sized magazine. It’s not exactly a comic book—there isn’t a narrative composed of sequential drawings—but a beautifully produced 12-page art book. The paper is slick and the art is very well reproduced. The only thing it can’t show us are the special effects the included in some of her drawings—sound and embedded video.
As time goes on, the memories of the Cold War and the fear and paranoia that accompanied it grow fainter. And it’s important to remember that the cheesy science fiction tropes that Mikulicz quotes were a direct product of anticomminist paranoia and the fear of nuclear destruction. No evil robot is just an evil robot.
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