Living in a Devil Town: long an underground cult hero to musicians, Daniel Johnston has more recently captured the attention of the art world in colorful, cartoonish drawings that relate the struggle between good and evil

Much press has been devoted of late to Daniel Johnston, an artist and songwriter residing in Waller, Tex., whose comic-book-inspired drawings were included this past spring in the Whitney Biennial and in a selected survey, from the 1970s to the present, at Clementine Gallery in Chelsea. His troubled life is also the subject of a 2005 documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that screened nationally at the same time the exhibitions were on view, and his songs score a rock opera, Speeding Motorcycle (titled for one of his songs), which played this summer in Houston to sold-out audiences. Characters in Johnston's drawings--Captain America, Casper the Friendly Ghost and his own invention, Joe the Boxer--make appearances in Speeding Motorcycle. For years an underground cult hero, mostly in the music world, the 45-year-old Johnston has been having his day in the mainstream.

Marked by sometimes violent episodes brought on by the artist's bipolar illness, Johnston's is the sort of story that whets the appetites of today's bottom-feeding culture consumers. The much lauded film (Feuerzeig was awarded best director of 2005 at Sundance) regrettably stokes this tendency, although the director has culled from an apparent mountain of visual evidence what I have to admit is a remarkable account, praised by critics for its sensitivity to Johnston. Yet Feuerzeig's annoying tic of jerking stills in and out of close-up, as if getting us to look more closely, feels at best jokey and at worst contemptuous of our powers of discernment, and the film's 110 minutes torment us with overly protracted scenes of suffering on the part of Johnston and his family. (1)

I, for one, could understand why Johnston had "a hard time sitting through the documentar" and couldn't make it through a second viewing, as one writer reported. (2) After just a few seconds of watching him spin crazily about in his studio, bloated and prematurely aged by who-knows-what prescriptions and a diet of Mountain Dew and cigarettes, I found myself covering my own eyes and wishing it were over. What saves the film is less its anecdotal zeal than Johnston's artistry, as it is his own Super-8 home movies and other serf-produced footage, stills and songs that carry the resonance.

The film implies, among other failures of logic, that the Christian fundamentalism (i.e., Church of Christ, hardly wild-eyed fanatics) in which Johnston was raised wreaked havoc on his psyche, along with a punitive mother and, at a key point, a stretch of hallucinogens. Leaving aside the tiresome issue of parental responsibility, it could be argued that, rather than inflicting irreparable damage, Christianity, with its vivid struggle between good and evil, has provided Johnston with a topos that he exploits to great effect, particularly in the drawings. What better imagery exists to express the individual in the grip of forces beyond his control? In one drawing (1990), God appears in the clouds above a wasteland with only a tree stump and another tree broken as if just struck by lightning; pointing sternly toward the ground, He orders into existence a new shoot (one presumes He had a hand, too, in the fate of the other trees). Johnston's religion might be seen as an outlet, not a curse, for someone who, after all, shares a symptomology with people who were not religiously raised; Christianity is--along with TV, popular music and unrequited love--his creative fodder.

More than that, the battle between good and evil, between Satan or his minions and the benevolent beings who also inhabit Johnston's drawings, illuminate the extent to which Christianity's agon permeates American culture. One of my favorite Johnston songs, which he sings a cappella in recordings and in the film, is "Devil Town":

I was living in a devil town Didn't know it was a devil town Oh Lord it really brings me down About the devil

And all my friends were vampires Didn't know they were vampires Turns out I was a vampire myself In the devil town

Beyond the black humor found in so many of Johnston's songs, these lyrics speak to an uncomfortable complicity we Americans suspect we have with evil, an alliance that is perhaps most readily named by those who live on the edge of our culture--as Johnston does--and by those outside (Mujahadeen, the French, et al.).

Johnston wanted to be an artist before he wanted to be a musician, and from a young age he began drawing. He briefly studied art at the East Liverpool, Ohio, branch of Kent State just over the border from his childhood home in West Virginia. There has been little "stylistic" evolution over the years; the drawings at Clementine from 2005 are essentially the drawings from the 1970s: ink on paper, or ink and colored markers on paper, with a recurring cast of characters in simple outlines and rainbow hues, and lots of speechifying. Among the characters are Johnston's alter egos, Joe the Boxer and the Man in the Polka Dot Underwear, always on the go (shades of Jonathan Borofsky's Running Man); an evil phallic bird and an eyeball with bat wings; nude female torsos with lopped off arms, legs and heads (murder victims or sculptural fragments--it's hard to tell); friends and family; and the Innocent Frog, with eyes on tendrils, who became a kind of identifying logo on the wrappers of basement tapes that Johnston used to hand out on the streets of Austin.