In Dowd’s two-page spread titled “Portrait of the Artist: Elvis Presley/Jackson Pollok” a jean-clad Pollock sits on the runner of a jalopy wearing paint-speckled loafers, his solemn brow etched deeper in the shadow of a tree. Opposite him, Elvis in plush trouser-pants straddles the atectonic fin of a white luxury car (likely a cadillac). Unlike much of the mostly collaged content of this artist’s magazine, this composition by Dowd is clearly partitioned, but the Elvis/Pollock contrast is precisely the dialectic out of which Dowd’s chimerical Fanzini ‘74 is born. 

Neither pop-star nor painter escapes their simplistic allegorical constructions–Pollock mired in the tenebrism of his representation nor Elvis his flashbulb fame. Here, Dowd restores them to the equivalence of the magazine page. and exposes the sparkling world of the magazine for what it is– a two-dimensional universe.