French-filtered transgressive graphics at Track 16.

The French expression le dernier cri translates idiomatically as "the
latest fashion," but literally as "the last cry," as of a dying culture.
The French DIY publishing collective that goes by that name has, over
the past 10 years, managed to tread a fine line between the two -
issuing a torrent of urgent, violently apocalyptic picture books
that showcase the most exciting international graphic artists
around in a medium rooted in the independent production and
distribution strategies of the '90s zine underground.

When I first encountered its lavish, hand-screen-printed
collections of comix-based images, I assumed that Le Dernier
Cri was some kind of deep-pocketed vanity project instigated by a
wealthy collector/patron in Europe, where comic art has always received
a certain respect and support, both institutional and popular. How else
could an independent publishing concern manage to produce what
amounts to bound limited-edition albums of original prints -
averaging more than a dozen uniquely designed titles per year -
and sell them for peanuts? I recently learned the answer, from
LDC co-founder Caroline Sury: Do all the work yourself, and
never give up in the face of indifference, whether from the high
art world, or the low.

Sury was in Los Angeles to collaborate with contributing artist and
"West Coast Ministress of Propaganda" Georganne Deen on the first
U.S. exhibition of Dernier Cri artifacts at Track 16 Gallery in
Bergamot Station. LDC began when Sury, who had been producing
a post-punk industrial zine called Hello Happy Taxpayer, met
multimedia whirlwind Pakito Bolino and relocated with him
from Bordeaux to Paris and then to Marseilles to set up a studio and
explore and combine their interests in the laborious, relatively high
end medium of serigraphy and the further reaches of comix art. At
first LDC primarily showcased the couple's own work, but soon
found itself serving a rapidly expanding global community of
underground artists.

LDC's only obvious precedent is RAW magazine, a beautifully
offset-printed comix anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise
Mouly in the 1980s. Some of the most interesting artists who came up
through RAW - like Gary Panter of Jimbo/Pee-wee's Playhouse fame and
Mark Beyer of Amy & Jordan (both of whom have published in the L.A.
Weekly) wound up working with LDC as well. But after the first few
issues, RAW began to take on more and more of the kind of upscale
East Coast toniness that led to a Pulitzer Prize (for Spiegelman)
and a gig at The New Yorker (for Mouly). Which is cool. But you're
never going to see the work of expatriate Minnesotan and LDC
regular Stu Mead on the cover of that venerable publication.

Of course, the way things are going, you probably won't be seeing
Mead's work being published anywhere in these United States. Mead's
art - like that of many LDC favorites - tends to the transgressive,
specifically a penchant for surreal, voyeuristic scenes of salacious
middle-aged men and exuberantly perverse schoolgirls, a recipe for
unwanted official attention in America. Mead caught heat for his
zine Manbag and has since moved to Berlin. Mike Diana, the only
American ever forbidden by law to make art, has done several books
for LDC. Fredox, Jonathan Rosen, Laetitia, and Henriette Valium
(whose own Montreal-based silk-screened comix led to an early LDC
alliance) have contributed to the photo-collage house style revolving
around medical atrocities and sexual torture.

The violence, sexuality and angst of much of this work may be
provocative, but the Grand Guignol tradition has played an important
role in both post-punk industrial culture (even from before Nine
Inch Nails) and comic books from the EC horror era to the
phantasmagorical debaucheries of Zap. (And Marseilles is, after
all, the hometown of archetypal expressionist madman Antonin
Artaud.) Compared to the remarkable formal accomplishment,
the shock value seems beside the point.

Perhaps the most accomplished unknown championed by the LDC
is Moulinex, a French artist whose inexhaustible visual vocabulary
and seemingly effortless painting and design skills overflow in his
four-part series, Art-pute Carnet. The fact that someone so obviously
gifted in traditional visual art has come to any public attention
only through the sponsorship of a renegade group like LDC is
testimony to the cultural xenophobia that characterizes The
Art World. Although LDC has recently started issuing actual
wall-hanging framable prints, its inroads into The Art World still
consist pretty much of . . . a show at Track 16. And Moulinex isn't
alone - flipping through any issue of LDC's ongoing anthology zine
Hopital Brut (which has to date printed work by artists from 100
different countries), you are continually startled by the daring,
the beautiful and the completely unexpected.

While individual artists have their relative strengths, much of the
integrity of the LDC catalog lies in its visual consistency: Most of
the photographic work leans toward the purplish
bleached-by-the-sun-in-the-drugstore-window end of the spectrum,
while the work that exploits silk-screen's unparalleled affinity for
layering usually employs garish fluorescent orange and pink or metallic
inks. This consistency of palette is a result of the DIY nature of
LDC - most of the color choices are made during the printing
process by Bolino, Sury and whoever else happens to be working
the screens. In many ways, Le Dernier Cri can be seen as one
large collective artwork- collaborative in nature but funneled
through the distinctive aesthetics of Bolino and Sury.

Nowhere is this element of Gesamtkunstwerk - "total artwork" -
more apparent than in the feverish compilations of animated sequences
produced since 1997 by LDC's cinematic arm, Le Plateau Symetrique,
and screened in Track 16's tiny back gallery. With dense, careening
experimental soundtracks assembled by Bolino and friends, these
relentlessly paced mishmashes of costumed live action, puppetry
and every imaginable form of animation this side of Pixar are
nevertheless utterly cohesive. This is partly due to each having
a rough narrative structure - Le DernierCri (1997) walks us
through the publishing process (if by "walk" you mean to
stagger through a waterlogged carnival freak show with a
headful of acid), while Hopital Brut (1999) offers almost
an hour's worth of vignettes set inside a nightmarish
psychiatric facility. This fall (in addition to at least three
new books and a revamped Web site at www.lederniercri.org),
a new film anthology on the theme of "savage religions" will
tour Europe, if not L.A. C'est dommage!

LE DERNIER CRI: Legendary Publishers of the International Underground | Track 16
Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. C1, Santa Monica | Through August 16 | 2003 | (310) 264-4678