NEWS: World-Famous Surrealist Writes Me Lovely Review For "Dank Themes"

My old buddy and ultra-brilliant moustachioed collagey surrealist Xtian finally finished my book of horrible short stories "Dank Themes", and wrote me this very lovely review.  Was so nice to read it!  We can spend days, weeks, months, trapped down the well of our own experiences, so it was reassuring to read that, YES, some of the concepts and people and stories that I hurl out of my own well are making it over the edge and splashing down into others'.  Thank fuck!  

Here, this is what he said:    

"Mat Blackwell is a friend and collaborator, so it breaks my heart to say, that THIS BOOK HAS NO SPACESHIPS IN IT. If there is one criteria I need in a good book, it's a spaceship. His previous work, the "romance-for-blokes-but-with-a-twist" novel "BEEF", was in fact a sci-fi of sorts - with no spaceships. His multi-award winning work for TV and the internationally acclaimed (and awarded) comedy series "Bruce" has no spaceships. How long can this go on, Mat?

So let's take a look at the damage instead - and damage it is. These are not your highbrow literary stories, a lot of these are covered in mud and blood and even shit - and they sit on your top shelf. These are provocations from the bowels of the brain - some of the scenarios will make you frown or even pinch your nose. (The book comes not with an introduction by Paul McDermott [DAAS], but a WARNING). But you persevere - why? Because none of it is for cheap laughs or just to be the Dennis the Menace of literature. From the get-go you find that Mat has something to say with each story, and not only to say, but to get you thinking about it. I'm not spoiling things here by revealing that every story is followed by a "Page left blank for purposes of introspection/ consideration" - and you don't feel like he's being pretentious. Every story is visceral enough to leave you with your head-spinning - not necessarily disgusted or shocked, but definitely pondering. And might I add a lot of these stories are very short, so to hit that hard that quick - that's a fecking artform.

The highlight of the entire work is the level of obscenity-meets-philosophy, delivered so well in a world so easily offended and distracted by taking offence. It's not that Mat is not worried about offending, but like all provocative philosophers he "goes there", and worries more about being misunderstood, or even ignored for all the wrong reasons.

This collection also contains two of the most heart-breaking stories I've ever read, but then there are those that make you laugh out loud and spew a little and then ponder the inescapable logic of it all. How does a man who shuns spaceships in a book (even though he's actually into that stuff) do that?!

Just be glad he does. An absolutely splendid collection of stories - not one I could fault - and highly recommend. Well done, Mat."

 

I was asked if I'd write a foreword...

 

the micturating angel!  by xtian

So, I was recently contacted by my lovely friend and colleague XTIAN (you may have seen our work together on the world's longest ever digital collage?  That work is actually called 'With Uninhibited Fingers For the Unfathomable', but we usually just call it 'The Infinite Collage' because we intend on doing it for the rest of our lives.  It's available HERE).   He knew I loved his collage comic 'The Micturating Angel', and was wondering if I'd write a foreword for it.   Of course I said yes.  Oh, and you can download a PDF of volume 1 of 'The Micturating Angel' for free right HERE!  What a lovely chap he is!

This is what I wrote: 

A Glowing Foreword By Multi-Award-Winning Author Mat Blackwell

 

“That’s exactly life… my imagination’s playing up again.” – Lucinda

“This is the dream… this is an omen” – Hayley

“Now torment me twice” - Bella

 

There is no tenacity like the tenacity of a surrealist collage artist. 

To do this shit, year after year, to no acclaim and no audience and for no money – lesser mortals would be crushed.  Normal people have no idea what it’s like to spend hours, days, weeks, painstakingly cutting out tiny little things and sticking them on other things, arranging, moving, shifting, rearranging, composing, decomposing – and all the while know that no-one else will even look at the finished product, and, if they happen to somehow come across it and actually spend some moments glancing at it, no-one will care.  In this modern-day megatopian nanobot media blurscape, every artist knows that their work is competing against far more eyecandied hooks – like a cat that looks like Hitler, or small children smacking themselves in the face with playground equipment – an artist needs to be pretty fucking lucky to get even the most cursory of squints.  A surrealist collage artist knows, deep down, that they are only making art for themselves and their small lurching circle of weirdo friends.  As a surrealist collage artist myself, I know this firsthand.  And yet, I persist.

My dear moustachioed Hungarian friend Xtian takes this tenacity to a whole other level.

Where the rest of us barely have the energy to bring ourselves to make our art at all, Xtian makes entire books of it.  And then takes that concept and makes a fucking series out of it.  I’m talking multiple volumes here – huge fucking slabs of dense surrealist majesty, shat out like some warped magic goose’s extravagant golden eggs.  Literally thousands of collages, is what I’m saying.  Each panel is a visionary mélange of weirdness and tits – sinister occult entities and ancient angelic forces battling over the crude three-dimensional lives of mortalkind – and yet Xtian blesses us with panel after panel of this complex polymembranal dada gold, weaving quasi-narrative threads together into a vast hypercolour^TM shroud of déjà vu and metaphor.  Where other surrealist collage artists take a single snapshot of whimsical third-eye visionquest, Xtian records the whole damn journey.

These monumental half-stories are populated with actual almost-characters, actual almost-plots.  You can feel the narrative pulling you, even though it’s impossible to articulate exactly what that narrative might be.  Sex, drugs, horses, gymnastics – it has everything.   The level of detail is staggering.  Each character has their own traits, their own weird habits, their own inexplicable ways of moving through the work.  Take the horrifying blackened voice-bubbles of Mr Dick-ring – he only ever speaks in terrifying emptiness…

Which brings me to the dialogue!  Oh the dialogue!  Xtian has taken the glorious strategy of nearly always deleting words from voice-bubbles that are already there, so the original narrative of the comics he’s working with peeks timidly through – just tiny shards and flickers through the madness, but enough to give the whole work this magical dreamlike half-story, like you could actually understand it if you just read it all again one more time.  It’s like how the statue of David was already there, fully-formed, inside a hunk of rock – all the artist needs to do is chip away all the parts that aren’t David and there he is – Xtian applies the same process to the dialogue in these cheesy 1970s comics and WHOOMPH, suddenly we’re left with just the David.  Except in Xtian’s vision, David is not some fey bloke in the nuddy, but a riveting dada tale of herbs and nazis and an urgent sin machine and men eating Jack (and of course so much more).  It’s a special kind of subtractive dada, and, as a writer of words, I love it so much.

But let’s not forget the visual side either.  Xtian doesn’t just cut and paste.  Xtian morphs and whirls and shimmies – he erases the boundaries between panels to warp time and space, he takes the narrative form of the comic and turns it into a multidimensional kaleidoscope – in fucking black and white.  Does this panel happen after that panel?  Does time flow this way or that?  Is this character the same person as that character?  Didn’t this already happen?  In this ridiculous epic, the answer is always yes and no.

Somehow, despite the gruelling level of detail, despite the thankless grind, despite the lack of fawning millions and what should be celebrity status, Xtian carries on.  A work as grand and nonsensical and epic as The Micturating Angel should not exist, but yet it does – it does!

Thank fuck for the tenacity of the surrealist collage artist. 

Love yer work brah.

                                                                                                                                                MAT BLACKWELL                                                                                                                                                              LOCKDOWN, 2021

NEWS: Xtian dedicates entire post to Beef!

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure here, let me just firstly say that Xtian and I have known each other for many years, and continue to make strange art together (see here, here, and here for examples), both in physical forms and in an ongoing digital Exquisite-Corpse-style mysterious-swapsies-type-art-piece/game/distraction known as the Infinite Collage (or "With Uninhibited Fingers for the Unfathomable", to give it its proper title), which is perhaps the longest piece of art in the known universe, and is viewable here.  So, point is, he's no stranger - in fact, we like each other quite a lot.  So you can take that as meaning that this review of his is meaningless or whatever, but I don't see it that way at all: after all, I never asked him for a review, and even if I did (which I didn't) he didn't have to do it, and even if he did do it (which he did), it didn't have to go into as much detail as it does, nor did it have to be so wonderfully positive and/or expressive about the coolness of my novel.  

TLDR: it's still unbiased, and still totally awesome, and I'm very very stoked about it.

Read the full excellence right here!  And then buy all of his artworks and books and so on to help him save up for his moon-home, he'd really appreciate it.

Left to right: Tim Harris, Xtian, Mat Blackwell, and Dan Kelly, at our four-way collage exhibition a few years ago: "The Wrong Head: 4 Men, 100 Collages".