Artists of the Year

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  Jim Denomie, 'Koochie and Tuffy'

"Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

"The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise...but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us—for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the mythmaker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."

Her words could apply not just to writers but to artists generally. Art is not just an entertainment or a diversion, Lessing is saying, but a primeval urge—something ancient and noble and essential.

Our painters, poets, authors, musicians, actors, and dancers feed us spiritual sustenance. Like a chef reduces a sauce to enhance its flavors, artists condense life into something richer, a sensual consommé that allows us to better see, hear, feel, and ultimately judge the essence of the thing.

For all of their inestimable contributions, though, we sometimes treat our artists rather shabbily. The "starving artist" is common enough to be a cliché. We force them to subsist on patronage and grants, we gut arts programs in schools, we make them keep their day jobs.

And so each year, we try to restore some balance and give artists their rightful due. City Pages' Artists of the Year issue is an effort to reconfirm the worth of our creative spirits by asking prominent writers and people in the arts to pay tribute to an artist of the past year.

Here we set them on our ink-and-newsprint pedestal and bring verbal burnt offerings to our storytellers, dream-makers, and mythmakers. As we should. —Matthew Smith

City Pages' 2007 Artists of the Year:

• Stephen Colbert
• William E. Jones
• Diablo Cody
• Matt Sciple
• Christine Boyka Kluge
• Marjane Satrapi
• Ernest A. Bryant III
• Sheletta Brundidge
• The Writers Guild of America
• Jim Denomie
• Myron Johnson
• Alex Jones
• Christopher Hitchens
• Paul Dickinson
• Twin Cities playwrights
• Philip Pullman
• Craig Zobel
• Al Franken
• John Grider
• Bon Iver
• Ben Olson and Emma Berg
• Michael K
• Latisha Jones & Patricia Hampl
• Valve
• The Owls
• The Body Carto­graphy Project

Stephen Colbert

Satire was in trouble. An art form nearly as old as civilization itself, it had fallen on especially hard times of late. In the age of reality TV, the edifying gesture of the genre seemed all but dead. Fortunately, a gaggle of comedic talents started fighting back, among them Larry David, Ricky Gervais, and Jon Stewart. But no one skewered our political pratfalls better this past year than Stephen Colbert.

Colbert pokes fun at our media-obsessed state with a proctologist's gloved finger—or make that fist. His pitch-perfect riff on punditry, The Colbert Report, takes the most sacrosanct aspects of our culture—religion, race, patriotism—and whips them into a Jabberwockian froth. But Colbert does far more than merely parody a conservative blowhard. This year, his caricature of our self-obsessed culture extended to having himself as a guest on his own show; his "Better Know a District" segments shamed members of Congress left and right; and his unconditional "support" of the president reverse-engineered a probing analysis of the executive branch.

This willingness to tackle the commander-in-chief isn't new; aficionados of Colbert's antics may remember how last year, as a wolf dressed in sheep's drag at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he goosed the president and his sycophants but good. This year, however, he topped that performance by running for president himself, a campaign so ridiculous it made the other campaigns look...just as ridiculous. Like any good satirist, Colbert knows that the best way to make fun of his targets is to become them.

Colbert's erstwhile presidential bid arrived hand in hand with his other modest proposal this year, the book I Am America (And So Can You!), which, like the silent Ts in Colbert Report, starts lampooning our penchant for huff-puffery in the very title. Replete with charts, stickers, and Colbert's trademark nonsensicals (e.g., "It's time to impregnate this country with my mind"), the book has something serious to say behind the chuckles—there's even a transcript of the aforementioned Correspondents Dinner speech included for those who missed it. The result is a paradox we Americans deserve: the silliest book released this year is also among the sagest.

Eric Lorberer edits the award-winning Rain Taxi Review of Books and directs the annual Twin Cities Book Festival.

William E. Jones

News of Sen. Larry Craig's arrest by an undercover police officer in a public-toilet sex sting at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport exploded in the press in late August. Newscasters were befuddled as they reported the details. Later, Craig's explanation that his "wide stance" in the stall was misunderstood by the officer became a pop euphemism for gay. Public-bathroom sex became fodder for late-night monologues, and the site of Craig's bust turned into a tourist attraction.

All of that gives remarkable weight and context to the work of Los Angeles filmmaker William E. Jones, who exhibited at Walker Art Center last summer, just before the scandal broke. Jones's films often rework footage from the nonsexual moments in gay porn, and addresses the lines between fandom and obsession. In the process of mining images of gay sexuality in film, he uncovered an instructional film called Camera Surveillance, produced by the Highway Safety Foundation, that taught officers techniques to covertly film illegal sexual activity in public toilets. In this case, the footage shot in 1962 in the small town of Mansfield, Ohio, led to charges and convictions of more than 30 men. Jones's reworking of the footage, Mansfield 1962, which showed at the Walker, contains many levels of irony. The surveillance tapes were shot by police hiding in a closet—natch—and the explicit footage shows the sexual abandon and joy, but not the horror and humiliation that soon followed. The restroom in the film is a cultural and social equalizer, ensnaring men of various classes. In this case, most served several years in jail and had their lives ruined.

We will be hearing more from Jones soon. Next up is a spot in the coveted Whitney Biennial—the holy grail of emerging artists—where he will be presenting Tearoom, another found film on gay sex in bathrooms.