By Marilyn Bauer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Artist Mark Fox works in his studio in Camp Washington. (Glenn Hartong photos) | ZOOM |

When Cincinnati artist Mark Fox settled into a sun-lit studio this summer at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, he found it was infested with spiders. Spiders fell from the ceiling, caught in his clothes, built webs over his pens and pencils. They were a presence, as much "in residence" as the artist who had traveled there after winning a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Mr. Fox, who will be the first featured contemporary artist when the Cincinnati Art Museum opens its new Cincinnati Wing in May, the museum will announce Monday, decided to interact with the insects rather than exterminate them.

"I came up with this idea of making an installation for the next person who would use the studio - as a joke," he says. "I started making spider-sized drawings of household items - a blender, toaster, tiny dinette set - and leaving them in all the webs."

But night after night the drawings disappeared or appeared in a pile on the floor. So Mr. Fox set up a video camera, stayed up all night and videotaped the spiders taking the "stuff."

"It's one of the things I want to work on in my next piece," he says. "The videotape of the little drawings that were left and the spiders playing with a little fork or underwear. I want to do a performance of the spiders playing with these things, the weblike strings."

MARK FOX

| ZOOM | Born: Feb. 18, 1963 Marital status: single Favorite food: Ethnic Last good book I read: I just finished The Corrections (by Jonathan Franzen) Favorite indoor activity: Night or day? Favorite outdoor activity: Badminton Pets: I want a big dog Year, make, model of car: I have a soccer mom van but it doesn't work Most prized possession: My David Dillon bean engraving Three things I'd save if my house were on fire: I don't have a house. Favorite vice: I have no vices Every New Year's I resolve: I don't resolve anything. What I do if I'm wide-awake at 3 a.m.: Something people wouldn't believe I do I hoard: Nothing If I could do it over again: I will When I feel sorry for myself I: Don't If I couldn't do what I'm doing now, I would: Do something else. Favorite thing about living in Cincinnati: There's so many, where to begin.

Strings are key in any discussion with Mr. Fox. Perhaps known best for his work with Saw Theater, he has performed his tantalizing puppet shows throughout the country. Over the past decade he's had work in 20 solo and group exhibitions and collaborated on a puppet production, "A Criminal Story," partially funded by Henson Productions.

In 1999 he was commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera to create puppets for a production of Faust. Two years later his animated puppet film, Toy, was part of the Super Super Eight 2000 Film Festival that played in cities in North America, Europe and Japan.

Only `good at' art

The puppets loom in the cavernous space of his Camp Washington studio, just down the way from a working slaughterhouse that provides a bit of morbid entertainment when one of the "inmates" escapes or simply through the lowing of the beef. He's an infinitely likable man, who speaks in bursts of conversation syncopated by the movement of his vivid brown eyes. This morning he's dressed in black set off by a red button-down "greaser" sweater. His hair is unruly. He is dusty. He wears bowling shoes and has an incredible smile.

"I went to Elder, but I'm not a cop," says the former Bridgetown resident. He now lives part-time in his studio and part-time with his girlfriend, Elizabeth.

"By high school it was pretty clear to me I wanted to be an artist. I wasn't good at anything else. The art scene at Elder provided a haven for creativity verses sports. The teacher, Bob Beemon, created a community and showed us there were possibilities."

According to Mr. Beemon, who still teaches at Elder High School, Mr. Fox was a hard worker interested in new ideas.

"Growing up on the west side of town you don't get exposed to too much nutty stuff," he says. "He was always eager to take in something new. I have been teaching for 20 years, and there are only three or four kids I would say are geniuses. Mark is one of them."

Mr. Fox won a full fellowship to Washington University in St. Louis where he earned a bachelor of fine arts in 1985. He took a year off to paint before applying to graduate school. "I didn't want to apply with old stuff," he says.

Hanging puppets in Fox's studio | ZOOM |

The new work, predominantly figurative, earned the artist a full scholarship plus stipend to Stanford University where he began to articulate what would become his current style.

"I lived in California for almost three years. I loved California," he says. "My work completely changed while I was there. It went from figurative painting and drawing to narrative work. It became focused, and analysis came in."

After graduating with a master's of fine arts in painting, he returned to Cincinnati and went to work at the General Motors plant in Norwood, snapping headlights on Camaros and Trans Ams.

"I thought I would develop a body of work," he says. "I also wanted to build up a financial base. I feel fortunate I was able to pursue my work. Cincinnati is a very difficult city to be an artist in. I found a solid audience; it was underground, not mainstream at all."

It's not surprising the audience for Mr. Fox's work is not mainstream. When he moved from the canvas to making dolls or puppets of the characters he once painted, the stories they performed were informed by classics such as John Milton's Paradise Lost. It was decidedly intellectual, but the choice of puppets added a playful element and made the material easier to digest.

"He is treating profound and profoundly human subject matter - love and desire, evil, the striving for communication and connection, mortality - in uniquely compelling ways," says Thom Collins, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Center. "Mark's work is comparable in ingenuity and power . . . It is a real treasure."

The work evolved to include light, film and sound. In 1993, with sometime-collaborator Tony Luensman and Andrea Sparks, he founded Saw Theater, named for both the edginess and hand-built nature of its productions.

"I attended a festival in New York of international puppet theater," Mr. Fox explains. "I was moved in a way I hadn't been in years. It reached something in me that I'm still trying to get at. Tears were running down my face."

Saw's first production "puppetstory" was presented at the former in situ Gallery in Over-the-Rhine. Other shows followed in New York, Detroit and other parts of Ohio. The most remembered, "Account Me Puppet," opened at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1999.

"I have rarely been as moved by a piece of theater as I was by `Account Me Puppet,' says Mr. Collins, who was associate curator of contemporary art at Cincinnati Art Museum before moving to the CAC last year. "I walked away stunned as I had been the first time I witnessed one of the spectacles of Pina Bausch or Robert Wilson."

The performance takes its title from the line "Account me man" from "Paradise Lost." It is a retelling, with 20th-century sound and visuals, of the famed 17th-century poem about the Fall.

"I see the performance and theater as analogous to the Mass," says Mr. Fox. "It's a formal presentation wrapped in symbols. It comes out of Catholicism. I see it as a metaphor for how people see themselves in relation to duty."

Mr. Fox and Mr. Luensman are intrigued by religion and ontology, the branch of metaphysics concerned with the existence of being.

"Mark is a good art guy and a good smart guy," says teacher Mr. Beemon. "He's well-rounded, which is how he adds all these references to famous literature and religions into his work. You have to be a genius to put all that stuff together."

Along with the theological and metaphysical aspects, "Account Me Puppet" also included a variety of puppetry techniques - bunraku, marionettes, projections and shadow - spoken text and a live soundscape.

`Intuitive understanding'

A few days later, Mr. Fox wearing a chartreuse sweater over what appears to be a uniform of black, talks about how the puppetry relates back to the drawings, illustrations and the Cincinnati museum.

"It's all based on an intuitive understanding," he says. "I created little stages that referenced performance and (Joseph) Cornell boxes. I began to animate and the puppets evolved from there."

Mr. Fox is not only interested in the relationship between creator and the created but also of possessor and possession and creation and destruction. These interests are reflected in a number of ways, not the least of which through Mr. Peanut.

"Mark's sense of humor can be seen continually in his work," says gallery owner Linda Schwartz. "This humor is often dark but that is the side of reality Mark wishes to explore. The continual portrayal of Mr. Peanut - essentially Mark's alter ego as he is extremely allergic to peanuts - is an example."

"I just love him," says Sara Vance, a collector of his work and benefactor of the CAM gallery that will show it. "He is just so with it. When I saw his Mr. Peanut video, I said: `I have to have a piece of this man's work.' "

The first piece Ms. Vance acquired was a puppet whose head intentionally came off. Then she decided on a video.

"I hadn't collected video up to that point," she says. "But there's something about this man; he's going to be famous someday. He did `Death on a Pale Horse,' where Mr. Peanut sits on the movie projector and when you turn it on it looks like he's riding a horse. It represents what would happen if he ate peanuts. A picture of Mark appears on the screen with a scene of Cincinnati in the background. A cane appears and pulls off Mark's head and you see these little drops of blood. It's hysterical."

"This is an ominous piece, but not without humor," says Ms. Schwartz. "The destructive element in Mark's work has more to do with his awareness of life's cycles. He is interested in destruction, which is very much a part of reality."

For the Cincinnati Wing's opening, Mr. Fox will work off the idea of the destruction of the museum - a bastion of creation - and its treasures. He has constructed miniature sets of the galleries and imagined (humorous) circumstances under which they may be destroyed.

"These vignettes are about preservation and loss in an iconic way," says Timothy Rub, CAM director. "They are loopy things that deal with why museums deal with objects and their loss."

Mr. Fox has been spending much of the past few years on a long-term project to catalog his belongings. He draws his possessions, cuts them out with a razor then mounts them on a wall with wire of various lengths. The thousands of drawings morph into a single, explosive object. The effect is enervating.

"It's a wonderful personal cabinet of curiosities," says Mr. Rub.

"Mark is almost obsessively committed to this work," says Ms. Schwartz, who mounted his installations Downburst in 2001 and chitterchatter in 2002, both parts of the cataloging project.

"His studio is full of pieces, some complete, most in progress. There are suitcases full of studies and books full of drawings. Everywhere you look you see something being worked on. The output for a given show is intense. Mark always pushes the extreme in terms of the amount and kinds of pieces he produces."

"It is the process that is most interesting," Mr. Fox says. "It's a kind of discovery that takes place within. I spend an incredible amount of time thinking about this, conversing about this or doing this."

E-mail mbauer@enquirer.com

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