Caitlin Cass at Western New York Book Arts Center
by :
Colin Dabkowski
Caitlin Cass, The Great Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent: a Ten Year Study at Western New York Book Arts Center. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
If at first you don’t succeed, no worries.
Your foibles might wind up in one of Caitlin Cass’s acerbic comics, somewhere between a picturesque illustration of Isaac Newton violently poking a stick into his eye and Francis Bacon dying from pneumonia after trying to preserve a piece of chicken meat in the snow.
Which is a thing that actually happened.
These purported screwups count as successes in the strange and fascinating moral universe designed by the Buffalo-based comics artist and illustrator. A retrospective of her Great Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent (2009–19), mailed out periodically to subscribers and recently displayed in the print and digital pages of The New Yorker, spilled across the walls of the Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC) this fall like the contents of an overstuffed mailbag.
Cass, who has been exploring personal, historic, and imagined failures in her work for more than a decade, is slowly constructing a grand opus from her own fascinations with the stranger footnotes of Western history. Her growing compendium of florid failure is at once comforting and absurd, familiar and disconcerting. It throws you off balance in the most polite way imaginable, always drawing you back with the promise of more historical oddities.
To those who have glimpsed one of Cass’s New Yorker cartoons or chuckled at one of her dozens of small volumes of comics, the scope and ambition of her artistic project as seen in this exhibition may come as a surprise. Her exploration of the multifarious intersections of art, civilization, and failure takes the form of meticulously illustrated books, innovative paper foldouts dense with intricate explorations of history, bright illustrations of environmental disasters, and monochromatic ruminations on public projects and private obsessions.
“What I wanted to do was to make a history that prioritized failure instead of victory,” Cass muses in an introduction handwritten in neat white letters across WNYBAC’s matte black south wall. “I figured one day, I could step back and study my own work, in the way others study classic texts.”
Such an evaluation is possible, though viewers may find themselves laughing more than learning about historical moments and events as they encounter famous figures engaged in patently absurd activities.
Caitlin Cass, The Great Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent: a Ten Year Study at Western New York Book Arts Center. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
In the opening panel, for example, Cass presents a long vertical scroll of historical failures. They include poor Sir Francis Bacon, who, as Cass illustrates with a characteristically free hand, “died of pneumonia, caught whilst trying to preserve chicken meat in the snow. FOR SCIENCE.” Pandora, as most of us know, was given a box and told not to open it. According to Cass’s trademark deadpan? “She opened it.”
The show is suffused with Cass’s own second-guessing and self-doubt, a theme that ought to be reassuring to artists and non-artists everywhere. It appears in perhaps the most touching piece on view: an early book of comics in which Cass explores her childhood fascination with phosphenes—the strange patterns that appear when you press your palms into your closed eyes to stimulate your visual nerves.
One panel shows the young artist atop a ladder surrounded by a galaxy of abstract patterns and symbols. “It was like a club,” she writes of her accidental discovery. “Whenever I wanted I could close my eyes & discover & create. It was as if I were working on a painting with all of mankind.”
She felt cheated when she learned these images were a subject of scientific study but delighted when she discovered that Sir Isaac Newton had poked sticks in his eye to cause them to appear. That ridiculous image of Newtonian eye-pokage, like so many of Cass’s illustrations of historical absurdities both real and imagined, is what sticks.
This pleasant aftertaste of casual absurdity makes Cass’s work addictive. You find yourself returning again and again in search of that perfectly situated image—caught traveling between fact and fiction, between humor and horror, between the vagaries of real life and the freedom of the imagination.
More recent strains of Cass’s work, such as her dystopian story collection Myths (2018), seem to have a markedly darker tone. While her earlier work entertains while it educates and critiques Western traditions of scholarship and thought, Myths backgrounds the humor in its effort to transport the reader to much more uncomfortable places.
Given the variety and virtuosity of this introduction to Cass’s oeuvre, it would be foolish not to finish the ride.
Caitlin Cass, The Great Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent: a Ten Year Study at Western New York Book Arts Center. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Colin Dabkowski is a former arts critic at The Buffalo News and a future teacher of English.
Western New York Book Arts Center
468 Washington St, Buffalo, NY 14203
