Artists and Their Soapboxes
posted by MC @ 00:00
4 comment(s)
links to this post
... but, from the sheer number of 
The art on display around Adrian Cho's Edmonton home is not framed or first-edition. It is not Impressionist or even IKEA.
Many of the pieces are from Japan, and a few of them can run faster than a speeding bullet.
Mr. Cho, who has sprinkled his living space with action figures and anime creations, is one of a growing number of Canadians who view Spiderman and Transformer toys as acceptable accents to their home decor.
"We've always idolized art in some way: now it's just a Robocop instead of Rodin," said the 30-year-old video game designer.
It used to be that grown men who collected action figures did so on the down low. If they had their Star Wars figurines on display they were relegated to a "nerd room," a private space generally in the basement and always out of sight to guests.
But with the mainstream success of superhero franchises in Hollywood and the nerdification of culture in general, action figures have come out of the closet and are increasingly finding a place of pride on walls and mantels.
"There's sort of a nerd chic thing now," said Mr. Cho, who did his master's thesis on the action figure as artistic artifact. "We're not necessarily less cultured, but our focus is different. Pop culture and cross-promotional products are huge."
Bruno Bornsztein, a designer and founder of Curbly.com, an online community for DIY home decor, agrees that the celebration of all things geek has infiltrated people's homes.
"I have seen more people tricking out their house with comic book stuff," he said. "People feel more freedom showing off interests that would have embarrassed them before."
Part of the reason, he said, is that both comics and action figures have become more visually appealing.
Ratty cartoons have been replaced by bound graphic novels and Star Trek figurines have been bumped off shelves by Japanese Munny dolls.
The line has been blurred, Mr. Bornsztein said, between "people who are geeky and people who are arty."
That said, not every action figure he has seen in someone's living room deserved to be there.
"Some of it is really cool aesthetically," he said. "But I'm not particularly into the hardcore stuff."
Jason Beck, a 38-year-old stand-up comedian from Winnipeg who collects Yoda figures, falls into the more extreme category of collectors.
In his late 20s he was inspired by nostalgia to recreate the collection of Star Wars toys he had as a kid, and now owns hundreds of dolls, sculptures and toys.
"Because I'm a comedian, the collection is a lot more accepted," he said. "People just think I'm wacky."
He would prefer to have his Yodas scattered around the house, with one large sculpture beside a plant "because it looks like he's on planet Dagobah," but said his collection has been relegated to a single room by his girlfriend.
"She really wanted to get a house so I said, 'Okay, but I want a Yoda room,' " he said. "She went along with it."
Mr. Cho, too, said his girlfriend is understanding of his decor decisions.
"She knew if she wanted me, the toys come too," he said.
In their own way, both men are following the lead of other cultural institutions that have embraced animation and action-figure-inspired content as legitimate artistic enterprise.
The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale has a touring exhibition of limited edition toys called SubCultures: The Art of the Action Figure.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York owns work by comic artist Art Spiegelman, and the Art Gallery of Ontario owns pieces by Canadian graphic novelist Seth.
Douglas Coupland has integrated pop culture into his work with furniture design, and The Art Hotel in Berlin has a popular "Comic" room, where every corner and angle is outlined with a thin black line so that guests have the effect of being in a cartoon.
Mr. Cho believes the trend toward action figure decor began in the 1990s, when self-professed geeks started going online and discovered they were not the only ones who had kept their toys since childhood.
"Everyone was suddenly proud to dig stuff out of their parents' garage," he said.
He sees the items as an extension of pop art - instead of hanging Warhol's soup cans or installing a urinal in a gallery, his generation are putting their Princess Leia dolls on pedestals.
Bart Beaty, a University of Calgary professor who writes about comic books as visual culture, has confined his collection of comics and graphic novels to two areas of his house: The pamphlet-style Batman and Superman comics are in a closet in the basement, but the 3,000 European graphic novels he collected while researching his next book are on display in his dining room.
"We have people over for dinner and they sit there and stare and go 'What the hell is that?' " he said. "But I like the way it looks."
Tom Spurgeon, who runs the website Comicsreporter.com, said he used to hear stories about people going to great lengths to hide their action figure collections, but has recently noticed a trend in the opposite direction.
"With people under the age of 40 there's definitely a greater integration," he said. "The material's more accepted, but I also think the material's more attractive."
He has taken several trips to IKEA with friends looking for display cases for their figures, and has had lengthy discussions about how to light statues to best effect.
"They don't want to let go of their passions, but they're more serious about displaying them," he said. "There's a trend toward curating your collection."
And he is not just talking about men.
Mr. Spurgeon knows one woman who has an Evil Queen collection of action figures on display in her apartment, and heard from another woman who chose her house because it had built-in shelves where she could mount her army of toys.
Displaying dolls, comic books and spaceship replicas is not really any more bizarre than using a living room to showcase collections of tiny spoons or china teacups, he added.
"People want to fly their flag however they can fly it," he said.
"My Dad had coins and pictures of railroad stuff; my friend Kevin has pictures of people from Battlestar Galactica."
