It's Only Make-Believe...

Page seven, Gary Viskupic's "Make-Believe: A Visual Study of a Mass Movement"

I've written about the work of Newsday illustrator Gary Viskupic before (this link will take you to the first time I did, with lots of reproductions of his art, and progressive links to other pages with more scans). Other than the drawings seen in the Sunday Newsday TV Book, I've never really given much thought to collecting his work, although I had considered acquiring a print on occasion. Now, however, I have come into possession of about as unique an artifact as one could hope for.

I was contacted by an incredibly considerate woman from Long Island who had found something in a bookstore's ephemera bin, a stapled booklet of heavy paper attributed as "A Graduate Graphic Design Thesis Book Project entitled Make-Believe: A Visual Study of a Mass Movement. Designed by Gary Anton Viskupic, at the University of Illinois, Champaign 1968." She paid fifty cents for it, and in searching for more information she found this blog. I imagine she was intrigued by the Nazi theme--just as Viskupic himself had been, enough to base his project around such striking imagery. The depiction of war--sometimes blunt, sometimes abstract--remained a subject of fascination for him throughout his years providing content for the TV Book. 

I'll present the twenty-three printed pages objectively first, and then offer some thoughts. All can be enlarged for clarification.

(centerfold)

Viskupic would have been about 24 years old when he created this, with his earliest work in the TV Book appearing four years later. He clearly had a style of his own upon graduation (he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1965).

While I'm nobody's idea of a teacher--hell, I was barely even a student--to be frank, I'm gonna call this a C-grade thesis, at best. It seems to me that Viskupic put a lot of effort into the impressive construction of the project but half-assed its concept, creating some really cool pictures and then slapping in a bunch of Bertolt Brecht anti-war poems critical of Germany alongside them. The "Thesis Intent" offers somewhat bloviated academic language but little else of meaning, e.g., "The collages are personal expressions of the artist and by the very fact that they were executed in 1968, imply contemporary images." (Duh, and double-duh.) It's brief, yet still somehow feels padded. I suspect, in addition to being a graphic artist of considerable talent, he may have been a skilled BS artist as well! The arresting illustrations do the heavy lifting (and degree-earning).

In any case, it's an extraordinary relic, and one I will cherish. If you check out the comments on my first GV post, you'll see that, upon his death in the summer of 2024, many roll-off trash containers were parked outside his home and loaded with its contents. I suspect this item, among many others, was scavenged. Many thanks to the kind and generous Kathy for sending this to me--and asking nothing in return! More thanks to the bookseller, The Next Chapter in Huntington, "Long Island's largest independent bookstore," established in 1977. This old atheist says you're doing the lord's work!