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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox in his studio.
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Mark Fox is standing off to the side of a downtown Cincinnati gallery, talking about his most recent brush with death. It's a warm fall afternoon, and the sidewalks outside the Linda Schwartz Gallery are empty. Fox is surrounded by his own artwork: film loops, works on paper and a Mr. Peanut sculpture that also functions as an 8mm film projector. As is often the case, peanuts are the inspiration for Fox's work. They're also the source of his frequent, physical traumas.
"I'm very allergic to peanuts," he says in a soft-spoken voice. "I always have been, but I think it's more extreme now."
Fox's condition reasserted itself during a springtime visit to Munich, Germany. As part of a studio residency with four other Cincinnati artists, he created site-specific work for a gallery there. Exhibitions, sightseeing visits and dinner parties were part of the trip.
At one of these parties, Fox ate a dessert made of ground peanuts. Soon after, his nightmare experience took hold.
"I was taken to a Munich hospital," Fox says. "It was late at night, and the place was empty. I don't speak German, and the hospital staff didn't speak much English. They put me in an empty room and attached an IV to prevent my throat from swelling up and suffocating me."
During the night, Fox stumbled to an adjacent bathroom. He stared down empty hospital hallways and watched the IV slowly drip into his arm. Sleep was not an option. What if the IV ran out? What if an air bubble burst through his veins?
"I'd be half-awake and hit the buzzer on the side of the bed," he says. "A nurse would run in and frantically change the empty IV bag. I thought I was going to die. But I walked out of the hospital the following morning."
Reminiscing, Fox pictures the Munich hospital as a surreal scene from one of avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin's movies. He describes the hospital in expressionistic black and white.
Death and peanuts are Fox's favorite topics. This nightmare hospital would soon find its way into his work.
Increasing exposure
At 38, Fox is a painter, animator and -- along with Tony Luensman -- co-director of the avant-garde troupe Saw Theater. Fox is something of a cult figure in the close-knit circle of Cincinnati artists, students and patrons of the underground arts scene. He has a dedicated following, similar to a Bluegrass singer in a remote Appalachian hamlet.
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox at the Linda Schwartz Gallery.
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He isn't widely known in the U.S. He's not even widely known in Cincinnati. Not yet.
This fall, Fox has enjoyed two simultaneous solo exhibitions in Cincinnati, at the Linda Schwartz and Semantics galleries, and he's already reaping the benefits. His works on paper are currently part of a group show at Kent State University. Some of his recently completed paintings will be part of the group show, Surface Active, opening Nov. 16 at the Aronoff Center's Weston Art Gallery. He has a local dealer, and more of his work is gracing private and public walls around town.
Audiences who know Fox only from Saw Theater performances will think he's branched out recently. The truth is he has been creating a diverse body of work for some time.
"All of my work grows from the drawings," Fox says in his studio in Cincinnati's gritty Camp Washington neighborhood. "I was trained as a painter. I know that some people think of me as a puppet artist, but it's the drawing that directs everything I do."
Fox is a wiry man with short brown hair and a boyish face. His hushed speech matches perfectly with his shy personality. His casual wardrobe of black jeans and a gray shirt makes him even more inconspicuous.
He isn't what you'd call a compelling public persona. He's a wallflower by choice. Encouraging Fox to talk about himself is a challenge.
"I like talking about the work, but I don't feel comfortable talking about myself," Fox says. "I have gotten much better when it comes to interacting with people. I can now socialize when I have to."
Cynics will tell you Fox should have left Cincinnati years ago. The fact of the matter is that the artist, who grew up in Bridgetown on the distant west side, continues to call Cincinnati home.
The Linda Schwartz exhibition, Mark Fox: Downburst, has aggressively pushed him into the sales-driven stage of his career. His challenge is to break out of the underground and find a sizable audience at home. The dream of solo exhibitions in other cities looms on the horizon.
The two recent shows offer a significant retrospective of Fox's work. Cyclones and spheres are the visual motifs that connect his drawings, paintings and animated films. He experienced a tornado firsthand as a child, and the experience stuck with him.
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox at the Linda Schwartz Gallery.
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Fox is young, but he's not a post-modern artist. The minimalist paintings he's finishing for the Weston's Surface Active show emphasize ethereal fields of yellow and green. The figurative sketches that form the base of all Saw Theater productions are classically drawn. His black-and-white animation resembles early shadow magic cinema and German expressionist art. The influence of South African animator William Kentridge is clear.
Weston Art Gallery Director Dennis Harrington sums up Fox: "I would recommend to anyone writing about Mark Fox to simply put the word 'genius' next to his name. Mark is incredible. He truly is a renaissance man. He does so many different things, and he does them all well.
"Is he the greatest living artist in Cincinnati? Well, I would argue he is. He's certainly in the running. My only complaint is that he receives so little attention."
Creating a space for performance
If one place represents Cincinnati's growing avant-garde community, it's Saw Theater's semi-official auditorium on the second floor of Fox's Camp Washington studio. While Saw has performed in other venues around Cincinnati, most of the group's patrons know about riding the freight elevator to this informal performance space.
Fox staged his first public theater performance in December 1993. In 1997, the Weston Art Gallery hosted A Criminal's Story, a collaboration between Fox and writer David Zaza comprised of two small stages for puppet theater, screens for animated projections and shadow play and a podium where Zaza read his text. It offered a peek at the artistic direction Saw wanted to take itself.
Saw Theater staged its first public performance in 1996, and became a non-profit arts organization in 1998. A board of directors was formed to help raise the necessary funding to hire staff, create larger projects and sustain a regular performance schedule. Raising money continues to be a tough battle.
Account Me Puppet, an elaborate performance piece inspired by text and images from Milton's Paradise Lost, was commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Last fall, it played in front of enthusiastic Cincinnati audiences for six weekends. Fox says the series of shows garnered the group its best publicity, but the momentum faded quickly.
Word-of-mouth continues to fuel Saw's audience growth. Fox and Luensman rely on friends like David Dillon, founder of Semantics Gallery, to help mount their elaborate stage productions.
Currently, Fox and Luensman are designing a new set and finalizing the company's next production. More importantly, they're deciding on a direction for Saw Theater.
Both artists have individual projects to finish, and their dream of Saw becoming a full-fledged performance company with a regular schedule of shows looks more unlikely.
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox in his studio.
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"Tony and I are discussing what we want to do with Saw Theater," Fox says. "It's clear that we can't become a regular theater group like Cincinnati Shake-speare Festival. I'm not sure what's going to happen. But I know it's too much for two people to run themselves."
Saw Theater receives greater acclaim outside its home city than here in Cincinnati. The group performed to enthusiastic crowds at Philadelphia's Fringe Festival, New York City's Thread Waxing Space and the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts. Meanwhile, a commission from Cincinnati Opera to create an installation piece for a 1999 production of Faust remains one of Saw's few local highlights.
But Fox is tired of Saw being a cultish theater group. He wants the group to be better appreciated here.
He has a vision that replaces marionettes and black-and-white animation with live actors. The question is whether there are enough locals willing to support the type of performance art they've seldom seen before.
A full-time artist
Fox says his ambition to become an artist was fueled during his teen-age years at Elder High School. He's the first artist in his large German/Irish family. His father Jack was an accountant, his mother Shirley, a homemaker.
Fox left Cincinnati in 1981 to attend Washington University in St. Louis and later Stanford University in California. He returned to Cincinnati some 8 years later. His original plan was to stay here briefly before heading to New York City, but work, friends and an inexpensive studio keep him from relocating.
Fox currently teaches a performance class at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He's taken a daytime job at a body shop to help pay for repairing a friend's car that he wrecked.
For the most part, he's a full-time artist. And that's something he doesn't take for granted.
A burst of creativity
At the Linda Schwartz Gallery, Fox stands alongside his sprawling installation, "Downburst." It's an impressive wall sculpture comprised of 1500 ink drawings on paper. He made it by sketching the various items he keeps in his studio -- chairs, 8mm cameras and a bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon.
Fox painted the backside of each drawing with green acrylic paint. The effect is that "Downburst" gives off an eerie green glow. The drawings are splattered across the white gallery wall in tangled spiral.
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox in his studio.
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True to Fox's tornado obsession, "Downburst" has the look of a whirlwind of debris tossed together by a force of nature. It's a prime example of his morbid sense of humor, portraying disaster with mischievous glee.
"I was inspired to draw everything that I have in my studio," Fox says. "I imagined what things would look like if a tornado ripped through my space and tossed everything into the air."
There's an element of fantasy in "Downburst," a feeling that's shared in Fox's animation and film loops. A twister upends a small house in Wizard of Oz fashion. The grainy black-and-white film stock gives the scene a creepy atmosphere.
Fox sustains a creative dialogue between and among his paintings, films and performance art. Marionettes match perfectly when he's working with a pop culture icon like Mr. Peanut, just as black-and-white animation is the appropriate medium when he's addressing spiritual themes.
Fox makes electronic media art that appears quaint when compared to most contemporary video artists. He shoots 8mm film loops and builds elaborate installations involving huge film platters that reflect the pioneer days of cinema. Part of the fantasy is the fact that his film installations look antique.
Cattle and minimalist art
Little has changed at Fox's studio space in Camp Washington. On the second floor of an abandoned meat packing plant, he continues to create his various sets, stage pieces and artwork for use in his elaborate productions and installations.
Dusty clutter is the phrase that best describes the loft. A menagerie of larger-than-life sculptures and assorted marionettes hang over a work table. A tower of antique suitcases holds six years' worth of drawings. It's an impressive space filled with extraordinary sights.
The bray of cattle from a nearby slaughterhouse is constant. Last week, Fox watched a bloody cow bolt out on the slaughterhouse dock. Workers cornered the cow in Fox's parking lot, killing it with electric prods.
Watching from his window, Fox blocked out the animal's cries and returned to his work.
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Mark Fox in his studio.
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Fox has made Camp Washington his home since 1995. The neighborhood is as tough and dirty as ever. DiLeia Gallery has come and gone. Gentrification has yet to hit this corner of the urban landscape.
A front room adjacent to Fox's studio serves as the Saw Theater offices. Basically, his entire life is under one roof.
The concrete factory building he calls home is a landscape of blacks and grays. The sets, puppets and sketches create a black-and-white Grimm Brothers forest, no different from his 8mm monochrome films. The only splash of Technicolor belongs to the canvases he's preparing for the upcoming Surface Active show.
Fox's yellow and green triptych brings a soothing burst of color into the gray room. Viewed adjacent to his Saw Theater set, it's hard to see it all as the work of a single person. Thick layers of greenish paint give the impression of a color landscape. The spiral images are so subtle that the paintings remain completely abstract.
The paintings are truly metaphysical, inviting contemplation. The work is thoughtful and beautiful.
It's also fairly classical in design. The painting's stretched canvas is meant to be shown on one side. There's nothing cross-defining about the work.
"I treat painting as an object," Fox says. "It is not representational of anything for me."
Focusing on the work
There's a mix of anger and apathy when people speak about Mark Fox. Friends question when he's going to receive the recognition he deserves. They wonder if he'd be better off elsewhere.
"I think Mark has accomplished as much as a visual artist can in Cincinnati," Dillon says. "Mark has a really loyal following, but I don't know what one needs to do to attract support from the movers-and-shakers in town. That's a tough question."
The variety of choices available to Fox in the Cincinnati come into question when one considers the absence of progressive programming. Others might have a hard time defining his role as an artist. While his shadow magic films fall into the category of low art, his paintings are considered high-brow.
It's tough to label yourself when you're a renaissance man.
Saw Theater plans to tour in 2002. But the goal to move future Saw performances to a larger local public venue has yet to happen.
Some things stay the same. Painters continue to leave Cincinnati, but Fox continues to stay in Camp Washington. He agrees he's come a long way since his first show at In Situ Gallery in Over-the-Rhine in 1993. His future is what remains unclear.
"I don't think about the future in terms of my career," Fox says. "I don't think about moving to New York. If I did, I'd be planning to move. But I'm not.
"I focus on the work. I don't have the time to do anything else." ©
