Author: Andrew Melone

I wanted to mention the white, creature-thing in my last post, but I forgot/it didn’t really fit in with the theme. Again, this isn’t going to be the most literary critique, so sorry about that. But what the hell is that white thing!? Maybe I’m reading into it too much, but when I originally saw it, I thought it was some kind of rodent. The way it moved around his new apartment, or at least the way I imagined it moving (yay closure), seemed very rat-like to me. Later, however, it seems like it started behaving much more like a dog than anything else. Dog is what I’ve settled on for now, but I’m still confused by why it looks the way it does. Obviously Shaun Tan wasn’t just going to draw a regular-looking dog in this book, but it’s also hard to deny that it looks quite a bit like a certain type of human reproductive cell was just given a mouth, eyes, ears, and legs. Also gills. Why the hell would a dog have gills? Maybe it’s not supposed to be any real type of animal at all, but I was hung up on it for a little bit.

So this may not exactly be the most literary of blog posts, but it was something I found interesting as I was reading The Arrival. I totally get that the arrival is a depiction of life as an immigrant and how difficult it is to adapt to a seemingly different world. It dramatically depicts the struggle to adapt to a new culture and the process that many immigrants go through of going to the new country before the rest of their family. At the same time, I found myself losing that narrative a bit and being swept up into a bit of a sci-fi, fantasy, post-apocalyptic narrative. I think the panel that really did this for me was the one in which giant men are sucking people up into vacuums with spotlights honing in on the fleeing crowds (I forget which page this is). I think it was a combination of the perspective of the image as well as the vacuum hose and spotlight, but for whatever reason, this panel really reminded me of the film War of the Worlds. Specifically, it reminds me of the scene in which the giant alien tripods are collecting people. Ultimately, it was really cool to have these two readings side by side, and I often found myself switching back and forth between the two interpretations.

I thought the discussion on Wednesday about where Asterios Polyp should be displayed was really interesting. I didn’t really have much to add to the discussion during class, but now that I’ve thought about it a bit more, I’ve formulated an opinion. I don’t think Asterios Polyp should be displayed in a museum. Why? Well, partially due to the fact that it would be displayed in a manner in which it was not intended to be read. For example, to display them on a wall, it is likely that they wouldn’t simply be placed in a line in order from left to right on the wall because, well, that’s a supremely inefficient use of space. Even if it was displayed in nice rows and columns from left to right, top to bottom, due to the lack of pagination it could be read in any number of ways. Some may read it left to right, top to bottom, others top to bottom, left to right, others may (as Alfred would say) just want to watch the world burn and read a page here and there, skipping around in a random order. This I don’t really have much of a problem with. I think it’s a really interesting and valuable exercise to mix pages and see if the order truly matters and to look into the numerous ways it can be read. My real problem with this stems from the fact that we view museums as being official. This could lead many people to believe that however the museum has the book displayed is the way the book was originally intended to be displayed. This gives a false impression of the book and ultimately alters the original authorial intent. For that reason, I don’t think a museum is the right place to display the book, unless there is a hard copy of the book on display that the patrons can flip through alongside the display itself.

I’m not going to lie, going into Monday’s workshop, I wasn’t expecting to get much out of that class period. I thought it would be a good time to start thinking about the final project and get a head start on the work, but I didn’t think it would really help me to think about the class material at all. Well, I was wrong. One of the first things I realized when I started working on my collage was that I suck at arts and crafts. Okay, so maybe I realized this multiple years ago, but I must have forgotten or stopped caring at some point. Either way, it made me realize just how time-consuming creating a single collage is. It took me the entire class just to come up with an idea, find the necessary pieces, and to cut out just a few of the images I wanted. I’d always thought of collages as a less impressive form of art (the few times I’ve ever thought about them), but Max Ernst and the process of creating one of my own have changed my mind. It’s extremely impressive to me that Max Ernst was able to create an entire book of collages in just three weeks. To come up with that many ideas and to be able to execute them in that short amount of time is really incredible to me. It really gives me an appreciation for what a master can accomplish at his craft.

So as we talked about the male gaze in relation to page 47 in Une Semane De Bonte (the image of female legs being swept away in a flood as a man watches), I couldn’t help but notice something about the male figure that I thought was odd. The man appears to be wearing feminine clothing. It is difficult to tell exactly, but it looks to me like he is wearing tall boots under a calf-length skirt or dress, with a blazer on top. The figure even seems to have a feminine form. After covering the figures head with my thumb, I noticed that the figure even seems to have breasts as well. To me, this seems to complicate our discussion of the male gaze, but I’m not exactly sure how or even what extra meaning can be gleaned from this new information. At first I thought it might be a commentary that the male gaze has become so ingrained in society that it has actually become the societal gaze, but I don’t have much other evidence to support that theory. Clearly, I’m still not quite sure what to make of this, but I thought it might be a point of interest.

While we were talking about The Sick Rose in class on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were giving Blake a little too much credit for his work. Some of the things we were saying were clearly true. The rose clearly makes a circle on the page in which different stages of the moth’s life are portrayed. So obviously there’s the idea of the circle of life. And there’s obviously the idea of death and rebirth illustrated in the woman/worm/thing coming out of the dying rose. However, I also think there were some elements of the analysis that can’t actually be inferred from the painting as having been Blake’s ideas. For example, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Blake was trying to show that the circle of life was inescapable since the poem and illustrations were contained within the stem of the rose. Clearly he was trying to make the rose a circle to show the circle of life, but where else could he have placed the text? Simply by the nature of putting a circle on the page, he was cutting off the amount of space he had to write and draw. Trying to accomplish this outside of the circle would simply be illogical. Though this example may seem a bit nitpicky, it was not the only assumption that I felt we irrationally attributed to Blake; however, it is the one that I remember most clearly. This DID make me wonder though. How much can we ever really attribute to an author or artist? Sometimes their intentions are clear, but how deeply can we really analyze a text or image without attributing our own thoughts to the artist?

As I was looking back through Los Caprichos, I couldn’t help but think of my class last semester that dealt with comics and graphic narratives. One of the major focuses of the class was the relationship between text and image. In many of the comics we read, the text and images were both vital to the narrative. Neither could tell the entire story without the other. If you lost the images, the text often made very little sense whatsoever. If you lost the text, a vague narrative could be conveyed, but much of the depth was lost. I find myself feeling rather similarly about Goya. In almost every image I’ve seen so far, I feel like it requires both the image and the text for me to gather a deeper understanding of the pieces’ intricacies. The text and images CAN be viewed independent of the other, but it is only when the two are put in communication that I feel any sort of deeper understanding. Perhaps that’s just my own disposition to art, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

As I read the excerpts about Achilles’ shield, I couldn’t help but read it as a sort of textual meta-image. The art described on the shield seemed to have some sense of self-awareness. Though the section of the shield (many of us placed this on the outer edges) describing the sun, moon, earth, stars, and gods did not really seem self-referential, the scenes involving people and the two cities did. While one city celebrates a marriage, the other is in a state of war, defending itself from outside attackers. Though no shield is directly referenced in this battle, it is not at all difficult to imagine the shield on which these images are crafted being used in a battle such as this, perhaps even this exact battle. It seems to subtly acknowledge itself as a shield through the art on its surface. Additionally, it is possible to interpret the images as representations of what the shield was built to protect. Since this shield was given to Achilles, a warrior who was not particularly hell-bent on mindless destruction and war, it is possible that the images suggest that the shield was made to protect humanity and all the other elements that the art encompasses. In that case, the description of the shield would be a textual meta-image because the art on the shield fully acknowledges itself.