Understanding Comics, Chapters 2-3; Persepolis

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud theorizes that human beings are self-centered and try to see themselves in many objects. He uses examples such as the front of a car or an electrical outlet. Since reading this chapter, I have noticed how I naturally see faces in inanimate objects. My toothbrush holder has three openings and looks as if it is about to talk to me. Making the subjects in comic books look more cartoonish does help me identify with these characters more and allows me to put myself in their situations. I have found I have been able to identify with characters in cartoons or anime more easily than television shows with real actors. Aside from the fact that their features are less individual and defined than those of real humans, the cartoons’ facial expressions are more pronounced, drawing me into the pathos of the moment. Seeing such strong emotion prominently displayed makes it more accessible for me as a viewer to conjure up similar feelings and empathize with the character, rather than sympathizing from more of a distance. If I am emotionally invested in the characters and story, I extremely likely to finish reading or watching until the end.

“Blood in the Gutter” shows us that negative space is crucial to comics and many other forms of art. McCloud asserts that “the art of comics is as subtractive an art as it is additive” (85). Comics must strike a balance between negative and positive space so that readers are given enough information without having their senses overwhelmed or their creativity and imagination stifled. McCloud observes that comics from Japan have honored this balance studiously throughout the years. He states that the East understands that “elements omitted from a work of art are as much a part of that work as those included” (82).

While reading this chapter, I thought of writer and artist Austin Kleon’s work in his project, Newspaper Blackout Poems. Kleon read newspaper articles and blacked out most of the words with a Sharpie, leaving only a few behind to create poetry. One of his most well-known works from this collection states, “Creativity is subtraction.” He seems to echoes McCloud’s view of comics, the “subtractive art.” Beauty is found in Kleon’s work not just through the readable words, which are themselves entertaining and honest, but also through the fact that so many words were read and chosen to be excluded by the artist. They have now become invisible underneath the marker, allowing the visible words to take on new meaning and beauty. Similarly, comics must use the invisible - the gutters - to connect panels in a way that makes readers understand the panels’ meanings.

This use of positive and negative space factors into Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi usually uses panels; however, she employs a different tactic when she tells her readers of her uncle’s death. This tragedy was one of Satrapi’s first that she experienced first-hand. She loved her uncle and worried about his safety when he was imprisoned. She uses panels to show their conversation in the prison, but then when she announces, “That was my last meeting with my beloved Anoosh,” (70) the drawing of the newspaper declaring her uncle’s execution is surrounded by negative space without the use of a frame. Perhaps this image shows that her pain could not be contained within a panel, that this hurt bleeds out into the empty vastness of negative space and colors her perception between every action from now on. She then uses an entire page devoted to the image of her as a little girl floating in a black background with the words, “And so I was lost, without any bearings...What could be worse than that?” (71). There is no gutter to use in between images on this page; this one panel must take up the whole page because for this girl in this particular moment in time, there are no such things as transitions. Loss and emptiness is all there is. The abrupt start of the war is signified by creating a new chapter. Many sections of Satrapi’s story employ smooth transitions between panels using the gutter, but she uses the technique of dedicating a whole page to one panel for certain images that symbolize a change in her life and culture to which she wants readers to pay close attention.

Kleon, Austin. Creativity Is Subtraction. 2010. Goodreads. Web. 24 Sept. 2012. 

Kleon, Austin. The Travelogue. 2010. 20X200 Artist Fund. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Random House, Inc., 2003. Print.

Barton & Barton: "Ideology of the Map"; Kress and van Leeuwen, 175-214

In “Ideology of the Map,” Barton and Barton explain how maps display the authority of the cartographer’s culture and society when creating the visual. In high school, my chorus teacher had told the class that if aliens came to visit Earth, they would not know which part of the planet we consider “up” and “down.” That was the first time I had ever thought about the globe and the decision to make the Arctic the top and Antarctic the bottom, and I was already fifteen or sixteen years old. Still, I had not even thought of how this positioning reflects a Eurocentric train of thought and power until reading this article. Maps, which I always deem practical and accurate, are another way of viewing the world in a subjective manner, separating dominant cultures, the “normal,” from the minorities, the “Other.” The non-Eurocentric cultures would probably be deemed “New” in Reading Images.

Kress and van Leeuwen assert that typically, the Given, the image that is held to be common knowledge or the normal standard of the culture and society, is on the left of a document. The New, which is the “Other” or image that challenges the self-evidence of the Given, is placed on the right. When I searched “McCain vs. Obama” in Google Images, many of the top images displayed McCain on the left and Obama on the right. Perhaps the creators of these images felt that McCain stood for the Given because the United States had a Republican president before the 2008 election. Obama could be seen as the New idea, the Democratic candidate, who contested the status quo. Obama may also have been considered the New because he was the first African American to be a primary presidential candidate during that time.

When I searched “Romney vs. Obama” in Google Images, I found that many of the photos place Obama on the left and Romney on the right. Perhaps this placement is due to the fact that Obama has been the president for the past four years seeking reelection. He is the Given; of course he is going to run for a second term. Romney, on the other hand, is the new candidate in this election, butting heads against the current administration and causing a disruption in American politics via the election. However, a few photos and images still place Obama on the right. An image from The Atlantic, for example, shows Romney and Obama in a boxing ring with Romney on the left. 

I found it interesting that The Atlantic is deemed a liberal magazine. I would have thought that it may have been conservative, leaning toward asserting that Romney should be the Given in this election. However, the magazine may have situated Obama on the right to make him still seem new and fresh to the audience. He is the more salient figure; his face is well-lit and is turned toward the audience, whereas Romney’s face is bent slightly down, hiding in shadow. Perhaps this image is a way to say that Obama is challenging conservative, old-fashioned ideals that Romney represents, such as strictly heterosexual marriage and pro-life choices. Indeed, the current president seems edgier when presented as someone New who rises up against the authority, although in this election, he is the authority. I also wonder if associating liberals with the left and conservatives with the right has any impact on people’s voting when taking this Given/New theory into account.

Another visual design decision includes placing an important image in the center, with the less important things surrounding it to become margins. Reading Images notes that the central composition is not common in Western culture, although it seems prevalent in many Eastern ideas and designs. In feng shui, for example, the bagua map does not ignore the center of the room. Rather, the center may be considered the most important area because it concerns personal health. If one does not have good health, one cannot gain success in the areas of life to which each other gua pertains, such as family, career and relationships. Admittedly, I tend to ignore the center of the bagua map when decorating my bedroom. Perhaps if I had grown up influenced by an Eastern culture more, I would pay the center more attention.

Visuals found from Google Images.

Sturken and Cartwright, Chapter 3

Throughout Chapter 3, a power struggle emerges between the image and viewer through spectatorship, the looking that is through an interactive, multimodal, and relational field. In fact, Descartes believed that world becomes known to us only when we accurately represent it in our thoughts. However, what if our thoughts are not correct? Is our world still unknown to us?

Jacques Lacan held theories that tell us we do not accurately represent our world in our thoughts. One of the crucial stages of development, according to Lacan, is the mirror phase between six and 18 months, which “involves a process in which the infant gains motor skills adequate to venture away from the maternal body and in this process comes to understand itself... as a unitary entity separate from that body” (Sturken and Cartwright 101). However, while the infant notices itself in the mirror, it also holds an idealized image of itself. It is separate from its world and its mother, so it seems independent. Obviously, such a young being is far from being independent; however, in its eyes, it is starting to see this burgeoning sense of itself and the other, the rest of the world. While I am skeptical of this theory (I am not sure if the human mind is capable of such thought at 18 months, and not every society has mirrors/multiple reflective surfaces for the infant to see so young), it does begin to explain how, at our very early stages, we misunderstand the reality surrounding us and ourselves in general. We do not have enough power to fully realize exactly what we are and how we relate to our environments because our perceptions are constantly flawed.

Foucault believed that a person is never fully self-governed; rather, discourses, “the socially organized process[es] of talking about a particular subject matter” or bodies of “knowledge that both [define] and [limit] what can be said about something” (439), guide our behavior and thought. For example, self-regulation is enacted by prisoners in a panopticon-prison structure, in which a guard tower can see into all the prison cells, but no one can see directly into the tower to know if the guard is standing watch or not. It gives a “Big Brother” sense to the world so that one never knows if one is being watched, so one must behave docilely at all times. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984; everyone is being watched, and no one knows for certain if the government has seen you perform something illegal until it is too late. Someone I know had put a fake security camera in front of his driveway to ward off potential criminals. While it was a real camera positioned outside, it was not even turned on. I did not know at the time that this is an example of an inspecting gaze; I only knew that it allowed him power over the criminals as long as they did not know it was fake.

Other theories of power come to light in this chapter. The concept of power/knowledge comes into play because it finds that most societies function through cooperation, not coercion. American society seems to be based upon this principle because citizens vote to allow budgets and certain rules to be passed in their communities. When they are coerced into doing something, they are up in arms, adamantly against something that goes against their rights as U.S. citizens. In societies, biopower becomes important because governments want their citizens to be healthy in order for them to be able to work, defend their countries, and reproduce. The infamous Uncle Sam poster acknowledges this power.

To me, the most interesting images in this chapter concern women. Women are usually regarded as the other, the entity opposing the norm. When they are not from a westernized culture, then they are typically shown as even more “other” in Eurocentric images. Many times, they are drawn or painted as highly sexualized, exotic creatures. These images fascinate me because while Western men have sexualized women in different cultures, they try to control the sexuality and experience of the women within their own cultures. Seen in this light, the non-Western women have a sense of power with their bodies that Western women do not.

American Treasures of the Library of Congress. "The Most Famous Poster." 1917. 11 Sept. 2012.  

          Web.

Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New    

          York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Practices of Looking: Chapter 2

The concept of “intervisuality” brings together a lot of ideas explaining how viewers create their own meanings in visual culture. In the example Sturken provides, the film release of Titanic found great popularity and success through an older Chinese generation. Supposedly, this phenomenon was brought about because crying while watching the film allowed the viewers to indirectly shed their sadness concerning the failed socialist practices that they spent their youth creating. While I am not presented with enough evidence to convince me that this explanation is true, it presents another dynamic of this particular film and its relation to its viewers based on culture and their past experiences.

During my junior year of college, I took part in an acting class that had students observe art in the school’s gallery and create a performance piece based upon the artwork one day. I looked at a painting that had red dice in it. Although I know that the painter did not intend for my reaction, I instantly grew sad thinking about how I connect dice to gambling, which I connect to risk, which I, at the time, connected to my uncle’s new job that would force him to take some risks. This path of thinking led me to remember my aunt, who had passed away a few years ago. When I presented my performance piece, I broke down in front of my class and sobbed throughout my on-the-spot monologue. 

I have no idea what the artist had in mind when she had created her piece, but I gave it my own meaning by connecting it to my memories of how my aunt took a risk and passed away and how my uncle was going to have to leave behind a banal life for a time in order to fulfill his duty. At the time, I did not know that this part of my life exemplified Barthes’ idea of the power struggle between an author and reader (or, in my case, between artist and viewer) within his 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author.” Likewise, my interpretation of the painting shows that intervisuality was also at work; I associated the red dice with risk because of my cultural setting. Perhaps the artist did not intend for this particular cultural viewing.

Coming from a culture that takes pride in its authorial defiance, I am intrigued by the ways employed by some artists to challenge the ideas of “high” and “low” culture. Once seen as tacky, kitsch can now be seen as possessions of educated art lovers. Dada blatantly pokes fun at conventional museum displays and curators’ ideas of high art. Causing controversy by adding “low-art” pieces or playing with the displays is an art form in and of itself; one can bring even more meaning to this action by taking the time to purposefully place certain pieces near each other, such as Fred Wilson’s display of slave shackles next to fine silver in Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. Viewers could not ignore the severe contrast between these two objects and the cultural meanings behind them. While some may celebrate the prestige and elegance of a time period that called for fine silver to be used for teatime, they must acknowledge that this time period also contained human exploitation, cruelty and intense poverty that allowed for such fine things when the viewers see this installation. 

Other forms of defiance manifests itself within bricolage and appropriation. For example, parodies and alternative versions of American Gothic have reflected social values and stereotypes within the original and new paintings. The newer versions that stretch the original’s meaning (or flip the meaning upside down) allow me to view the first American Gothic in a different, more educated light. I had always considered it to be a boring piece of art that did not hold much meaning to me; however, after viewing a few appropriations of it, I know see a few more of its social and cultural implications of the white, Puritanical couple who look as if hard work has provided them with a plentiful way of life. I admire the artists who saw the flaws and false implications within the piece and decided to show the world these falsehoods through new versions of the painting. These actions help our society to understand its own flaws in the hopes of changing for the better.