The late Mike Kelley made this drawing, and it’s now in the fascinating New Museum show of art from New York in 1993. The image is from a series based on the “Sad Sack” comic strip, except that Kelley has erased everything except the trash that is everpresent around the strip’s eponymous hero, a private in the U.S. army who gets everything wrong. I love the way erasure becomes a tool for depiction and emphasis, and failure becomes a heroic condition.
