This is "Covers" work Nr. 36 --- ink and gouache on paper. 21 x 15 cm / 8.25 in x 6 in. Dated August, 2001. "Duncan Youngerman's DICK STRIP." Price "20K x 10¢." In the company box: "Pan-a-Logue." The images and lettering are based on those of Chester Gould, a comic strip artist and author both Duncan and I admire, the creator of Dick Tracy. My parts are (c) and tm 2001 MSB and DY. Even my signature was done in emulation of Gould's.
This was done for my friend, the wonderful French and American contemporary music composer Duncan Youngerman. We did several things together, particularly an exhibition and concert in 2001in Espace Lhomond in Pari, France. His compositions were dedicated to superhero comic artists we both admired. My works in the show were as well. We both merged them with our more experimental concerns. It was wonderful. I made a large painting of this as well on a roll-up projection screen, so he could have as a backdrop for when the works were played. When I think of it now in 2019, I realize it prefigures my current Dr Great Art work!
Here is a bad Polaroid (remember those?) of it:
Concerning the show from the press release:
"From Thursday April 5th through Sunday April 8th the gallery Espace Lhomond in Paris, France will feature the visual art works of U.S. and Swiss painter Mark Staff Brandl as well as the music of U.S. and French composer Duncan Youngerman. Brandl is exhibiting large paintings and a site-specific painting-installation. Youngerman is presenting a concert of five new compositions, to be performed live by two saxophonists on Thursday night, April 5th, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The two performers, Sascha Armbruster and Beat Kappeler, are both members of Basel's Arte Quartett. Brandl and Youngerman share a similarity of inspiration and their respective works are mutually complementary. This show is additionally a foray into potential future collaborations for the pair.
Born in 1955 near Chicago, Brandl has been living and working primarily in Switzerland since 1988. Active internationally as an artist since 1980, Brandl has won various awards, had many publications and numerous exhibitions. His shows include galleries and museums in Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, the Caribbean, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Brandl has recently had three of his art works purchased by the Art Museum of St. Gallen, Switzerland and one acquired by the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. As a critic, he is a frequent contributor to New York’s Art in America and London’s The Art Book.
Youngerman, born in Paris in 1956, has lived and worked in the United States and France. He toured as electric guitarist with the Rhys Chatham Ensemble between 1988 and 1991. In 1989 he received the prize "Bourse Leonard de Vinci" for composition from the French government. His works have been performed in Europe, the U.S. and Japan by, among others, Group 180, Ensemble Modern, North-South Consonance, Asko Ensemble, Arte Quartett, Masataka Hirano, and (ex-Kronos Quartet cellist) Joan Jeanrenaud.
The link between these two artists of such different mediums as painting and music is the inspirational importance for them of the American comic book as experienced in their childhoods in the 1960s. For both these expatriates, this generally "untouchable" art form has become a rich source for achieving greater immediacy both within and without the accepted esthetic confines of "High Art," as well as a vital connection to their cultural roots. Brandl and Youngerman first became acquainted and discovered their creative affinity when both had theoretical articles exploring these notions published in the same magazine, The Jack Kirby Collector.
Brandl's decontextualized enlargement of accidental or idiomatic graphic detail (cross-hatching, dynamic motion lines, technological insufficiencies, etc.) coupled with his pungent, off-beat use of color, disorients yet freshens one's perception in unique ways. Likewise, Youngerman's music playfully explores the fine line between abstraction and emotion, distilling the exuberance of both visual and musical pop into a new language of pulsating line and contrametric sound strata. Contradictory dichotomies permeate both creators' works: "high" and "low" art, intellectuality and sensuality, rigor and excess, new technologies and old, contemplation and immediacy."
Here is a review from a French puböication, "Nouvelles rive gauche"
And here is an article in German about it from "Saiten":
