All words and images here ©2023 by Bruce Carleton.
For years, my best drawings had been going into the little notebooks I carried around. They weren't sketchbooks, because I mostly didn’t draw things from life in them—more like a somewhat notional diary. But I nevertheless considered them complete works in a sense. The problem was that not too many others did. For one thing, the little 7¾” x 5” blue-lined spiral-bound notebooks weren’t seen as art gallery wall fodder (with a few exceptions noted below). Plus, of course, not a lot of people ever saw them in in their original state. One example of how easy they were to dismiss is Art Spiegelman. I went to see him about putting something in his recently formed Raw magazine around 1980. I wanted to just present them as-is (something like what FIS became), but he said, in effect, “Come and see me when you’ve done something with this.”
In 1982 my friend Alex Blair decided the notebooks should see the light, so she and I chose some of the drawings and writings (but not much of the latter, thankfully) going back as far as 1975, and arranged them into this book. She had it very nicely printed and tried to sell it, but didn't have too many takers, thus seeing a wad of her money and a load of her time go down the drain on the venture.
Regarding the title, it was taken from a drawing that had the text “My Fun Is Sick” (a variation on My Gun Is Quick) on it. We thought that had a nice ring to it, but might be too confessional, and probably too creepy as well. I think it was Alex’s idea to shorten it to Fun Is Sick.
Regarding Alex, there is more about our fraught relationship in “Bioautography: Love Is a Losing Game” elsewhere in this portfolio. She has since become a devotee of MAGAworld and every conversation, no matter how I might try to steer it away, comes back to that. I haven’t talked to her in years… except for one time on the phone when she dove headfirst into an attack on my core personality, using my son as an evidential weapon. That did it. After a warning not to go there went unheeded I hung up on her, and that was that. Oh well. We don’t converse anymore, but she’s still my friend, theoretically… as long as I don’t have to talk to her.
A (very) few people actually bought Fun Is Sick, and I hear from them once in a while, which is excellent. Otherwise, it’s pretty much disappeared from the internet’s radar. A search will yield my own webpage’s small feature on it, a listing in a Chinese site called xqndy.com with no clues as to why it’s there (if you don’t speak Chinese anyway), and several links to pages where they say “killing animals for fun is sick.”
The page spreads [above) — Choosing what would make the cut from the 21 notebooks available at the time was a huge job. I turned the cache over to Alex to pore through, and she picked a bunch. I might have nixed a few as too embarrassing, and added a few that I liked, it’s hard to remember. They were then arranged according to theme, style, and what fit.
The cover — The book was set up to be spiral bound at my request. Printing on the thick cover stock was problematic, so we did it as a decal applied to a piece of suave gray paper, which was then applied to the actual cover piece (Alex’s idea). It was a lot of trouble.
The foldouts — These were Alex’s idea, and added greatly to the cost. But besides being intrinsically fun, they enabled some of the drawings to be enlarged quite a bit. FIS is sized at 5 1/2" x 8", but the foldouts doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled that.
The bucket of source material — The content of FIS was chosen from NB1 (begun in late 1974) though NB21. Timeframe: I was somewhere in the middle of NB21 (dated “Dec ’81”) when FIS was put together. There are no drawings from the back half of that notebook included, and none from NB22, dated “almost my birthday, 1982.”
Reviews — (1) The first and most noteworthy review of FIS was in Screw Magazine at the time. This isn’t surprising given that I was art director there. It was written by my friend and editor Gil Reavill, and went thusly: “Do not attempt to adjust your newspaper. There is nothing wrong with your vision. We are just reviewing ‘Volume One’ of Life Termed a Mistake: Carleton, titled Fun Is Sick ($9.50 for a first edition from Chong-Donnie press, 487 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10013). He was an infant boy, but his parents gave him a pen to play with! When they saw what he did with it, they took it away and gave him an Ex-Acto knife! Mondo Illo! Fun? Sick? Boy, is it ever! What else do you think would move biochemical accidents like R. Crumb to say ‘I like Bruce Carleton's sketchbook stuff a lot. I must send for one.’ They came for the art, but they stayed for the copy! Art director writes himself in and out of corners! Director? Damn hear killed her! Prose that comes on like solo slam dancing! Sex! Desire! Desex! Hmmmmm, seems to have a thing about sharp objects. Ambience phallique. Good thing he's on our side. Or is it? Or is he? We now return control of your newspaper to you.” (2) The only other publication to notice FIS as far as I know was an art-oriented tabloid called Express in its “Fall 1982” issue. The reviewer touted it as a source for “bawdy laughs, paranoid giggles, and a few metaphysical snickers,” “strange, leering women and greasy, drooling men,” and “sexual encounters [that] are grotesque yet tender.” More grist for my blurb trove are these bits: “Carleton seems to have a knack for extracting a laugh from some grim truth,” and “a cross between Matisse and Crank Collingwood [i.e. S. Clay Wilson].”
Shows, etc. — There have been occasional exceptions to the reluctance of gallery walls to accommodate my notebook stuff. (1) The first occurred sometime long about the summer of 1980. Steve Mass, the owner of the fabled Mudd Club in New York, told me to pick out some of my notebook drawings and blow them up huge to go on the wall of the ground floor disco/bar. I jumped at the opportunity, thinking “Now people will see! I might even get laid!” It was one of my early brushes up against the bitter truth of “this’ll be my big break… no, I guess not.” Nobody even seemed to notice. This exhibition, such as it was, is worth noting in the historical context of art in New York, though. Half a year later an actual gallery was opened on the 4th floor at the Mudd. It was curated by soon-to-be-wildly-celebrated artist Keith Haring, and is talked about even to this day as being a groundbreaking merging of “downtown” art and music (as illustrated by the plaque currently commemorating the site of the club at 77 White Street as shown here). I hereby declare that it was me what actually broke that ground. (2) The next notable appearance came in February of 1981 at the much-hyped “New York/New Wave” show at PS1 in Queens under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art. The show was being curated by my friend Diego Cortez, and he asked me to put something in. The only thing I had that I thought was worthwhile was in my notebooks, so I handed them over to him and let him pull pages out, some of which joined the work of over a hundred other artists spread though the former classrooms for that show. I have those loose pages he chose with the sticky bits used to put them on the wall still attached. That show made big waves and was seen as having introduced the world to Haring and Basquiat, who went on to fame, fortune and early death. I got no fame or fortune out of it, but at least I’m still alive. The Soho News called the show “a plain and timid thing,” but Interview said, “This is a tidal wave of art, about to reduce the entire art world to rubble…” Of course, neither of these was true. For me it was yet another verse in the “not my big break after all” litany. (3) Some time around in here, my artist friend Reneé Moncada invited me to add something to a paper he and his friends put out called The Office. As you can see, what I submitted was a spread of notebook pages, all of which ended up in FIS. (4) Most recently copies of pages (and even one actual full notebook) have gone onto the walls at the Beatnik Lounge in Joshua Tree CA. Here’s what was shown in this venue: “Social Insecurity” at the “Facebooklandia” show in August of 2017 (right) — this piece consisted of blown-up notebook pages stuck in a couple of window frames; original art used to make the FIS cover illustration, along with an array of postcards Alex had made to sell and to promote the book (center) — this went into the “Circus Jerkus USA” show in May of 2018; and, with the aid of Deborah Tobin, I cobbled together an expansive triptych of photocopies from the notebooks that I called “10,000 Notes” for the “10,000 Things” show in January, 2022 (left). Content from post-Fun Is Sick notebooks have also been foisted onto a few gallery walls and publications over the years, but that doesn’t really concern us here.
