http://inkstuds.com/?p=360
While I appreciate that it is gay of anyone to repeat any of his ideas ever, I enjoy how CF touched on the otherwordlyness of squares. I agree. I am stealing that idea. Squares: What The Fuck? As in, what came before the square? Why do we have it? Is it liberating or enslaving?
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I have never warmed up to comics the way I have to picture books. I really like children's books and anything with a nice full page illustration. Text way over there, art right here. No shitty thought bubbles. It is like a blissful audio tour inside an enchanted museum. Look at this beautiful shit:
In comparison, this is comics:
Even without titties, this looks like a page of sex phone adds. Confusion, ad nauseum.
For serious, as far as I can tell the clearest difference between comics and normal drawing or illustration is all the funny boxes around everything. Comics loves frames and paneling: The Magic Square.
I am conveniently excusing the entire history and development of the medium in favor of concentrating on a fundamental formal distinction, so let's proceed...
Short world history:
cave drawings - no frames to speak of
hieroglyphics- frames the size of a pyramid
painting for the catholic church- big frames
photography- smaller frames
film and comics- tons and tons of fucking frames
Films pretend to move but comics, like all good static art exposes the lie. Not only are the characters boxed in but they are frozen and repeated in an agony of non-motion, like when you see someone dancing in a strobe light. Yuck, scary.
COMICS: AN ATROCITY EXHIBITION
Infinite Containment
Exploitation,
Punishment
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Jump to 21st century. We are surrounded by the square frame! Everything is a screen or a panel or whatever. Nature has circles, triangles, lines, and blobs but I mostly see squares in architecture, construction, agriculture, prison, etc. The tools of man hath the frame while God and Earth are beyond it.
Back to our main point: the square is rather unnatural. Whether used in comics, picture books, or billboards it is a tool of separation, of reproduction and order. Like language it is difficult to imagine life without it, but of course we have not always had either. Perhaps.
If not always the square then, from what are its origins? Or from whom?
Images courtesy The Comics Curmudgeon, Comic World News Forum (not sure where, sorry!), "I Never Promised You An Egg Roll", and charismatic heresy (rad site!)
23 comments:
that jpg of comics is the perfect example to show how claustrophobic comics generally are - way too messy and way too organized at the same time. who wants to read a grid of information?
but all this talk 'against the frame' just reminds me of the historical avant garde, the desire to 'overcome' boundaries and constraints. it seems 'old hat' to me.
and since everything we know is manmade, or framed in the context of the manmade, isn't the frame more natural? all jpgs are rectangular, all books (that i've seen) are rectangular as well. i a) can't imagine working in a non-rectangular context b) don't see what that would yield
'The tools of man hath the frame while God and Earth are beyond it.'
as a man, what tools should i use?
'Nature has [...] triangles'
really?
I love that Ferdinand image...Robert Lawson forever.
this can't be serious
can it?
There's something clunky and stupid about comics. They lack the elegance of illustration. The density, the attempt to cram all of reality into organized spaces thrills me, though! -lots of information for my brain to untangle! Comics are about expectation, illustration is about delivery...
CF and Sol LeWitt, man! awesome crackpot minimalism!
thinking about this ... i have no idea where the rectangle come from. *wikipedias* oh that makes sense ... brickwork, tiling ... they fit easily into each other, they fit easily next to each other.
...
seems like the simplest way to divide up a space. i think maybe your problem with them is they are too logical, too 'modern' (re modernism)
seems like your essay could have concluded that comics are the perfect medium for our frame-obsessed society.
Unbelievably that post took a few drafts to finish.
In a previous version I touched on the avant garde thing. It is interesting that popular art in the 20th century seems to have reproduced the frame to excess (comics, film, video games, Warhol, magazines, etc.) while unpopular art (Art) attacked the frame with a vengeance.
Not hating; I'm just curious why that shape became our primary means of order to begin with. I think hexagons and triangles are supposed to be more stable building blocks. Imagine the strength of a triangular frame as opposed to a square one.
The squares not appearing in nature comment was bullshit. I suppose you can see anything in anything. It does strike me as distinctive how rarely squares are used to represent anything like divinity or transcendence, as opposed to other fundamental shapes like circles, triangles, stars, crosses, rainbows, etc.
On the other hand, squares (or rectangles) are the most consistent shape we use to harness nature through farming (imagine crop fields from a plane), art, and buildings.
It's like other shapes have a positive charge and are inherently powerful while the square needs to be filled. Because it is an insecure teenager or a vagina.
Robert Lawson/Sol Lewitt woot!
"I take cosmic themes and I turn them into finely detailed works for the Earth. This is the reason why I like diagrams so much, because a diagram is a neutral system, which can allow you to diagram anything. There are no limits to it, so as an architect I always appreciate that. It's like drawing the floor plan of the building on the ground and then starting to build it."
- Paul Laffoley
Comics by Jack Kirby and Chris Ware get me excited about the possibilities of squares, rectangles and right angles. Within each consecutive Kirby panel I feel the pulse of the picture plane whereas the frame of each consecutive Ware panel might literally pulse... There's so much possibility!
I often wonder what brought Chester Brown back to square frames? I really his layouts from Yummy Fur #21-32 and Underwater #1-9. I can't think of any other narrative comics that appear more clumsy and read more functionally. I like the restraint of Louis Riel but I love the panel to panel twitch of Underwater.
More Noise, Please: George Herriman, Guido Crepax, Gary Panter (Jimbo #6), Mark Beyer, Trevor Von Eeden (early work), Keith Mayerson, Ron Rege Jr., Anders Nilsen
Oh, Paul Laffoley. Good lord, thanks for mentioning Jason. Love when icons blend into maps.
This is my Understanding Comics:
"There's an epistemic ladder in Symbolism, going from a sign to an index to an icon to an archetype and into a symbol. A lot of people use these words and they use them to mean each other and I think that is actually incorrect. I think there's a technical distinction. A sign is something like a code, an arbitrary association of like A = B or A = 1 and you just start a code. An index is more like forensic medicine or like animal tracks in the snow, where you sense that something exists objectively, but apart from your direct experience of it.
When you begin on the ladder, you have what would be called the epistemic model: the knower and that which is known are in a mutually interdependent relationship where the knower is active and the knowledge is passive. That begins it. So as you proceed from a sign to an index to an icon, when you get to an archetype, you're moving to a point where you're recognizing that this is happening all around the world. It's more than, say, the way that Jung talked about archetypes. The concept of a collective unconscious is a diminution of the original alchemical notion of an archetype.
Finally we get to a symbol where the epistemic model has inverted so that the knowledge is active and the knower is passive.
In other words, you're going from a situation where you have a sense that you're totally in control of the information. You are this evolutionary bureaucratized creature who feels by its ego that it's completely in control of everything and if something magical comes along, it's an exception that you can avoid.
As you get into the epistemic ladder it becomes harder and harder to avoid it, until finally, when you reach the state of a singularity and pure numinosity*, the revelation has taken over you. The content has become the active, you become passive and then you are completely one with the universe."
- Paul Laffoley
*http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/n/numinosity.html
how do you mean 'understanding comics' in this analogy?
i am critical of what you posted, jason, even moreso the site you link to (result number 2 when googling 'numinosity'). but that is my gut instinct - i always take the side of 'society' when someone is criticizing it. i always criticize the critique first.
every once in a while i look at the 'post structuralism' entry on wikipedia and try to make some sense of it. i think if i read it through i would think, 'yes, this is as far as my mind can go right now. this is how i would like to identify.' looking at it now, i love this: 'Anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet.' this also relates to the talk that's been cropping up here about 'nature', which implies some sort of divine 'authenticity' that my mind is not wired to accept.
discussing semiotics with language (and on the internet) is such loaded territory. if i wasn't processing all this via words on a screen i might agree that authentic connections do exist.
i feel like i'm trapped in meta, but this trap is freeing at the same time. but i kind of feel awful at the same time. what do you get when you deconstruct everything? death seems like the 'ultimate' deconstruction.
ok i'm finally reading the entire entry ... this quote speaks directly to your text, jason:
'...language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker, that is, to the contingency of their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of language and all possible positions of interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer seems to be made of isolated elements lodged somehow in a Euclidean space... [Words] signify from the "world" and from the position of one who is looking.'
– Lévinas, Signification and Sense, Humanism of the Other
I'm inclined to agree with Blaise here. I think I get what Laffoley is saying - that symbols take on a life of their own after they're first used to indicate some phenomenon or other. But I disagree with a rigid taxonomy that seems to imply a system that's other than arbitrary. It's a nice map, a neat structure that precisely demarcates the life of symbols, but it is, again, just another metaphor that takes on its own life and substance, more related to the beauty of its pattern than what it represents. Post-structuralism at its inception was a helpful way to look at our push-pull relationship with media, but what happens after you become aware of, and possibly attempt to manipulate, that relationship?
I was reading a nytimes article, "artifacts from old europe," and was surprised by what appears to be rectangular doors in this old artifact: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/11/25/science/31471035.JPG , and I wonder if there's something deep within us that enjoys the stability of a square? The square recalls doorways or windows. I also think we like reading in lines, going down or across the page to form a rectangle. As for comics, since newspapers were rectangular, it makes sense that the first comic strips were rectangles in order to fit into the grid of the newspaper. The first comic books were collections of these strips, a few tiers on each page, and suddenly that became the vocabulary for a comics page. Squares fit into bigger squares.
I thought this line of yours was interesting Jason:
"...just another metaphor that takes on its own life and substance, more related to the beauty of its pattern than what it represents"
Can I interrupt to remark on how ugly the blogger comments page is: why the fuck am I here? Blogger is supposed to be Google and it looks like LL Bean designed an SAT test. Barf.
Anyway, Jason. Your phrasing is interesting in that it allows Laffoley's taxonomy itself to take on the power of the symbol: as an inflexible entity that masters its knower. You dismiss the taxonomy but only because you would rather not be mastered. In other words the dogma reproduces the effect of its content: religion. And still wins.
I like this one:
"In light of [post-structuralism's problematizing of certain Truth] I still do not personally believe that it would not be possible for there to be one singular Real or God or Belief that is merely hidden from man by his own ignorance and shortsightedness. Surely if something beyond our capacity for conceptualizing something beyond our capacity for conceptualizing existed (God), it would be beyond our capacity for conceptualizing and therefore impossible to describe but nevertheless not necessarily non-existent. Merely unknowable. This I think is the link between the death of God in the recent Western philosophical tradition and the unfathomability of God in the much older Western mystical tradition (and Buddhism perhaps) and why I don't consider postmodernism to be a threat to religion (or faith) at all. Well, not ultimately."
- Anonymous
Agreed. I don't think semiotics can extinguish the energy of the universe nor do I think God undermines rigorous philosophy. Pizza pocket, condoms, put me to bed already.
Agreed, Joe. I just wonder what the first square was that all the others are trying to fit into.
thanks for quoting me, + i am flattered.
-anonymous
p.s. stop me if you've heard this one, but...
'While postmodern cultural critics are comfortable giving voice to other people, they stop short at the nonhuman world-the paradigmatic "other." When it comes to nature, postmodernists are happy to do all the talking. They seem to see no need to heed the voice of the nonhuman, no reason even to assume that, in the vast world of rivers, chimpanzees, rainstorms, and whales, anything is being said. Postmodern cultural critics look at the nonhuman world and think that they are looking in the mirror. There is nothing out there with its own authentic voice because, as soon as we imagine it expressing itself, we recognize that we are speaking, and therefore making up, its words. As Christopher Manes puts it, "It is as if we had compressed the entire buzzing, howling, gurgling biosphere into the narrow vocabulary of epistemology, to the point that someone like Georg Lukacs could say, 'nature is a societal category'-and actually be understood."'
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=539
Agree 100%, JT! That is the problem with trying to make systems out if ideas that question systems! Unless you're Heidegger or God, and if that's the case no one's gonna be able to parse it all anyway.
Awesome quote, Joe! In what ways is the world itself a text? In what ways are we in a feedback loop with it?
There's a beautiful idea I've heard that we are, maybe, just a way for the world (which we are part of) to perceive itself.
And, yes, this fucking page for posting comments is butt ugly!
If our universe has an edge or a limit (that has in turn inspired the square or panel) I think it has something to do with light, the speed of light. Everything in the universe experiences time and space except for light. Anything faster than the speed of light (identical to infinity, incomprehensible to us?) would be outside of our universe. Maybe "light" is standing still and our universe moves through it.
Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison have played some fun games with this in the DC universe. They defined the Bleed as the hallways between universes. Of course this is a clever meta-joke, the bleed also refers to the area outside of a printed comic page.
So by drawing a square on an otherwise blank page, isn't that an expression of differentiation, binary duality, on/off, in/out, the positive/negative charge that makes atomic matter possible?
We know that we're here. The question is always, "where do we go from here?"
frames are spotlighting images, texts.
zoom & focus
"THIS is what I want u to look at"
highlighting the content of the universe, frame by frame
what is linearity anyway?
existence organized frame by frame
organization can be key in finding one's way; a way making sense of things
i think that those who are drawn to less rigid organization in 2D art have more confidence in their ability to either a)identify the artist's context and/or b)project their own context upon it. probably the sort who like to take aimless walks as an exercise in body and mind.
your thoughts are turning me on. i want you to fuck the shit out of me.
whoops scratch that last blurb in the comments! seriously it's actually meant for blaise
I think James Kochalka did a comic about this subject.
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