Allison Smith, Untitled, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Mark Newport likes to dress up like a superhero. He doesn’t wear Underoos and pose in front of the mirror (as far as we know), but he does knit himself full-length Spider-Man and Batman costumes out of yarn for reasons artsy and personal.
“I started making the costumes in 2003, partially because I had been making embroidered comic-book covers. They seemed to make the costume come off the page,” explains Newport, currently an artist-in-residence and “head of fiber” at Detroit’s Cranbrook Academy of Art. “My children were fairly young at the time, and I was concerned about how to protect them when they were going off to play without me,” he adds. “My mom used to occasionally knit sweaters for me and my brother, and I thought about superheroes and their costumes, and I know how to knit, so
I chose knitting.”
Those issues of protection are worth pondering. Comic-book devotees get a kick out of Superman’s invincibility, Batman’s cunning,
Spider-Man’s tenacity, and so on. To a child, a parent is a kind of superhero (and a supervillain, when it’s time for chores). If superheroes are surrogate parents, are comic-book fans terminal children? Is it wrong to want a father figure to flummox the bad guys and make everything come out all right? Are we getting closer to…religion?
Newport’s knitted costumes turn those sorts of ideas around by making heroes look absurd. There are no musclemen in skintight outfits, just a gallery of full-sized, empty yarn costumes hanging down like pitiful, comical, overripe fruit.
What’s more, the artist is rendering a hypermasculine form in a hyperfeminine medium. “When you mix knitting—a discipline that people expect a woman to do—with superheroes, which are very masculine, it raises questions,” he says. “Y Man [a hero of his own creation] makes reference to the genetic indicator for maleness. Bobble Man [ditto] is all pink, and he’s covered with bobble stitches. Can you still be heroic when you’re covered with little bumps all over the place?”
The costumes are a mix of heroic and antiheroic, male and female, and they swing between two other poles as well: hilarious and creepy. “When I first started making them there was sort of this giggling humor—that’s always fun when that happens in the studio,” says Newport. “I was thinking, ‘This is kind of hysterical.’”
Yet they also look kind of, um, unsettling, too. “One writer described one of the ‘Sweater-Man’ costumes as a mix of a teddy bear and a terrorist outfit,” he says.
Newport takes it to the next level when he pulls the costumes off the gallery wall and wears them for photo and video projects.
“All of the costumes are made to fit me,” he says. “I put them on sometimes to stage photographs or prints to explore how the hero might work in the world. I’ve also done live performance or video work, functioning as a hero or protector. One of my ideas is that the ‘Sweater-Men’ generate a force field through knitting. It contradicts the idea of action. It’s comical and pathetic at the same time.”
Has he ever put on a knitted Batman costume and strolled through a shopping mall, just to gauge others’ reactions?
“I don’t just wear them for fun,” he explains. “They’re God-awful uncomfortable and hot.”
Mark Newport: Self-Made Man runs February 5 through May 9, with an opening reception February 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. Newport will attend the opening, and will be knitting superhero costumes on-site. Indoor gallery hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tue–Fri and noon–5 p.m. Sat & Sun. Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott, 314-615-5278, laumeier.org.
