Douglas Huebler

American
(1924–1997)

Crocodile Tears II: Rudi Wexler
1982-1983

Oil stick, chromogenic print, and printed text on paper
20.25 x 33.75 x 0.75 in.
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2010.37

Crocodile Tears is a collection of ten black-and-white comic strips commissioned from Douglas Huebler by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and published in the LA Weekly as part of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. (A secondary title given this work in the 1986 MOCA publication Crocodile Tears was: “Brief fictions re-sounding from the proposal in Variable Piece #70 [1971] ‘to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.’”) Huebler did larger treatments of these strips in oil and/or acrylic on canvas with accompanying photographs and text. He organized several thematic streams of these later versions as Crocodile Tears II, to which Rudi Wexler belongs. Among the original ten strips is Crocodile Tears: Rudi, with an earlier version of the textual component. The continuity of the two texts attests to Huebler’s relentless inclusivity and continued exposure of hypocrisy and self-deception, and the centrality in his work of what he called in an interview “the face-off between Nature and Culture.”

Judith Vida-Spence

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This object has the following keywords:

• chromogenic print
• exercise
• face
• hat
• mixed-media
• people
• shorts
• sidewalk
• tank top
• text
• World War II

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Collecting on the Edge Part I , 9/15/2018 - 12/15/2018
• Collecting on the Edge , 9/15/2018 - 5/4/2019

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This object is a member of the following portfolios: