Synopsis
In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft reassembles a pre-perestroika era comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis, orchestrating a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered, collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging time. An enormous cast of characters emerges as Kraft appropriates images and texts from an extraordinary variety of sources (the Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology, Jimmy Swaggart's Old and New Testament stories, the 1960s English football annual Scorcher, underground porn comics like Cherry, images from art history, outdated encyclopedias and more). Kraft constructs a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and revelatory nonsense. Writer Danielle Dutton's set of 16 interpolations punctuate the book using similar strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition to create texts that sing in the same arresting register as Kraft's collages. Here Comes Kitty also includes a conversation between poet Ann Lauterbach and artist Richard Kraft.
Review
What unfolds is a plotless opera that is, in every sense of the word, hysterical. (Ryan Mihaly The Improbable)
Richard Kraft and Danielle Dutton’s Here Comes Kitty, a collage project (Kraft’s) with written interludes (Dutton’s), beautifully, wantonly, defies review. Like a dream, it slips off the binds of the mind, building up structures which differ from those present upon rational waking. The images it combines are unlikely bedmates. What it says, if it says anything, it says without concepts. It channels disparate locations and histories into singular, pressurized, visible forms. (Natalie Helberg Numero Cinq)
Kraft’s book is duly dreamlike and mystical, excerpting text and imagery from biblical stories, Hindu iconography, found photos and children’s primers, and collapsing them all into palimpsestic visions and portmanteau people. The raucous paper opera is regularly “interrupted” with prose poem entr’actes by Danielle Dutton, before returning to its elaborate system of motifs and patterns, pitting sense against nonsense in a way that’s both cosmic and buoyantly childlike. (Sean Rogers Toronto Globe & Mail)
Kraft took the Cold War comic book Kapitan Kloss, about a Polish spy trying to infiltrate Nazi Germany, and superimposes a plethora of wry, humorous, erotic images on top of it. His pool of resources was wide: images cut from Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology can be found next to clips from underground porn comic Cherry. The result is a densely layered visual cacophony with a multiplicity of characters and influences. Despite hinging on the absurd it remains engrossing and visually captivating. The dense visuals are interspersed with 16 text sections written by author Danielle Dutton. They are similar nonsensical, pastiche. A stream of consciousness that echoes the creative visuals. (Sehba Mohammad Flavorpill)
Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera explodes off the page. Kraft, a multidisciplinary artist, pastes images of Hindu gods next to exercise diagrams and drawings of monkeys and elephants into bars and restaurants ― all superimposed on a pre-existing 1960s Cold War–era comic. Equally bizarre and juxtaposed fragments of text, composed by Danielle Dutton, accompany the images. The effect is seductive. (Megan N Liberty Hyperallergic)
Soon we feel that even Kraft’s interruptions are gathering narrative force: again and again that rabbit, the goddesses’ hands. Yet as one page compels us to the next, each simultaneously becomes a universe of its own. Subverting becomes telling, bombs become themes, and narrative turns itself sideways, upside-down. (Danielle Dutton BOMB Magazine)
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