Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"When the stone martens in deep Bavaria gather to too their picturesque horns,
"The falcons of Arabia resist the orders of their masters,
"And the foxes of Leipzig congregate for a sexual cult dance,
"The world is about to receive a new artist.
"In the moment of an artist's birth British scientists succeeded to detect an...
"Atypical phenomenon which came to be known as 'the sigh of the Universe."
"For a fraction of a second, a wave of extremely high frequency was measured.
"Which also seems to be the cause of human hiccoughs.
"This insignificant discovery is certainly leading the way for an artist's life.
"As soon as the embryo hatches ,
"The young artist is ready to absorb the sadness of the world."
I decided to go with that pull quote rather than my first choice, though, I really did agonise about it. Oh what the hell, here's this one as well. See what you would have chosen...
"Oh, heyyy Lucy. Hrmm... Sorry I missed you last night at Pat's show.
"Yeah... no... I left when Carlos shoved acid up his butt and hell broke loose.
"...Alrighty, talk to you soon."
Anna Haifisch, creator of the utterly bizarre and truly insane VON SPATZ, a fake biography about Walt Disney having a nervous breakdown and going to a very peculiar sanatorium for artistic types to recover, produced this collection of shorts back in 2016. Given you've all been studiously ignoring picking VON SPATZ up, despite my best attempts to sell it to you, I thought I'd double down and get this in as well. I think I prefer this, actually.
The humour on display here, at times hilariously, outrageously crude, in the depiction of the life of the titular aspiring but perennially failing artist, is so satirically on point that I found myself giggling out loud on the bus on several occasions. Always comforting for fellow passengers, that, observing one of their number on the verge of mild hysteria...
I said it about VON SPATZ, and I'll say it again, fans of Michael STICKS ANGELICA, FOLK HERO DeForge and George GHOSTS, ETC. Wysol need Anna Haifisch's material. As I commented in my review of that work about all their art styles...
"In fact, if you are a fan of their gloriously incongruent, clashing colour palettes and determinedly unreconstructed illustration styles, you will love this work. It's a real talent to make such unusual artwork seem perfectly normal and flow pleasingly across the eye, before then smashing your synapses to smithereens once lodged in the grey matter."
Look, it's completely weird and stupidly funny. What more do you want?
