MINIMAL INVOLVEMENT:
R. SCOTT WHIPKEY

The political acuity of the graphic novel has increased greatly in the last several years, beginning with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God in 1978 and continuing with Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, followed by Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo and more recently with Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi in 2000. The novel graphic approach in the work of Brooklyn artist R. Scott Whipkey distills political issues into sourly expressive nuggets that are long lasting yet impossible to spit out.


His New York Times, 2008, displays the famous logo of the “newspaper of record” as a brand name diktat of irreproachable gravitas, allowing it to display an arrogance similar to that of the former Soviet organ Pravda; its name in Russian meaning “truth” is a mantel the NYT swears is its own. Separated across three panels, New York Times reminds us of various trinities we’ve come to rely upon, father,son, holy ghost; liberte´, egalite´, fraternite´; judicial, executive, legislative; but their sum in his rendition reveals them as going, going, gone.


Meticulously depicted in graphite it has the flourish of an ostentatious autograph, much like the outsized “John Hancock” on the Declaration of Independence, well aware of its own importance and reveling in it. Featured in this exhibition is Untitled (Handshake), 2009, a triptych that echoes a slow motion replay of the history of the United States’ involvement in Iraq over the last generation. The work is three enlarged images, each fractionally different, of a videotaped 1983 handshake between Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East and Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq. The approach-avoidance dance between the two lasted more than twenty years and Mr. Whipkey’s three freeze frames of their clasped hands is a storyboard of the compromises of U.S. foreign policy, the Judas kiss of realpolitik. Mr. Whipkey’s faux digital triptych––the work is meticulously hand drawn, placing it in the realm of historical painting––is an endless loop of making a deal with the devil but already, to borrow a line from George Orwell; it was impossible to say which was which.

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