Author: Amy Zhang

I really like the Selznick blurb on The Awakening interpreting the fantasy elements as culture shock–that as the narrator arrives in a new country, the architecture, writing, and animals are so wildly unfamiliar that they seem fantastical. It captures the loneliness and confusion inherent in any immigration experience, and Shaun Tan’s narrative is compelling and absolutely gorgeous.

Obviously, however, it does slightly romanticize a painful and complicated narrative. Introducing a magical element to explain homesickness and culture shock vaguely hints at colonialism and assimilation in a harmful melting-pot sort of way. But it’s definitely an interesting take on immigration, and it absolutely captures the sheer unfamiliarity of moving to a foreign country.

I’ve always found reading graphic narratives to be a daunting task, mostly because I haven’t read many. Graphic narratives requires equal attention to the graphics and the narrative, which is something I find difficult. It’s interesting to think how the process of creating a graphic narrative differs from writing or drawing on their own; the graphic artist must consider what he wants emphasize in art and downplay in writing, and vice versa. Similarly, I think graphic narrative literacy is very different from that for literature or art.

That said, I wholly enjoyed Asterios Polyp. In particular, I really liked the aspect of Greek Mythology woven throughout Asterios Polyp, from the unromanticized Aristophanes dialogue to the echoes of Odysseus and Penelope in Asterios and Hana. I’d definitely be interested in rereading the book, since I’m aware that I spent more time with the words that the pictures on my first read.

During the collage workshop, I found myself thinking about a philosophy of literature class I took a few semesters ago during which we discussed the legitimacy of black-out poetry. A  lot of people argued that using a marker to obscure all but a few choice words on a page could not be considered an original work, and others argued that black-out poetry was no less legitimate, but simply worked with a smaller lexicon.

I really enjoyed the collage workshop, but I found myself asking a similar question: am I producing something original? The product I pieced together wouldn’t have been possible had Vogue decided against including an Alice in Wonderland shoot in their December issue, or an interior design feature, or an ad featuring an unhappily married couple. But looking at my finished collage, it’s clear that there’s no place for it in Vogue. So obviously the process was transformative, but how much transformation is necessary for a work to qualify as original?

 

It’s probably not particularly groundbreaking to be fascinated by the epigraphs, as they’re the only written part of the entire book. Still, there’s an element of collage there as well–Max Ernst is still cutting out parts of other source materials and repurposing them for his own use. There’s the same sense of cutting and pasting and rearranging.

In particular I liked the epigraph for the second book, Monday, the Element of Water, which is from Benjamin Peret’s endormi:

“D. — What do you see?

R. — Water.

D. — What color is this water?

R. — The color of water.

The enigmatic answer is both explored and emulated throughout the following section of the collage novel as the water takes on different characteristics–calm, cleansing, turbulent, relentless, unstoppable. The novel, of course, is in black and white, and the water is colored only by perception. The epigraph draws the reader deeper into the images and sets the tone for the section.

We often focus on artists’ choices and the motivations behind them, but it’s interesting to think about the choices artists have to make because there are no realistic alternatives. Yun-Fei Ji, for example, is hindered in his modern exploration of ancient hand scrolls because he’s creating a public display of an inherently intimate art form. The hand scroll is traditionally a solitary (or at least very private) experience, and so to work with it in a public setting can mean the loss of certain elements, such as the sense of movement gained by unrolling a scroll or the element of physical interaction. And of course with an exhibition, the artist also has to consider the spectator, especially when many of the spectators will have a language barrier or be missing some sort of cultural context.

I really admired Yun-Fei Ji’s attitude towards these obstacles–of course some things are lost, but a lot is gained as well. At one point, he described art as “fragmentation and collage”–the artist must piece together what he can, where he can, and trust what he is doing.

I was initially hesitant about the print workshop, mostly because it’s difficult to imagine a creative and enjoyable space in the basement of Dunham. I ended up really, really enjoying the process. I wasn’t expecting the process to be as labor intensive as it was–going through and finding each letter, arranging them, transferring them onto the printing press, preparing the ink, getting the ink on the rollers, printing proofs, and then printing a second set of proofs took a lot more time than I would have imagined. Having always considered the print revolution as a huge step into modernity, it was surprising to see how slow and manually dependent it was from a modern perspective. I really appreciated the opportunity to try the process myself, however, and I’m definitely a lot happier with the takeaway product than I was after the last workshop.

In class, we talked about how Goya is considered both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the new. The reasoning behind this is easy to see in the difference between his two phases, particularly in how he interacts with the elite class. Phase 1 of Goya’s work was commissioned and classically trained by the ruling class; his work cooperated with the existing relation between art and elitism. (Of course art still carries a sense of exclusivity, but in Goya’s time the intensity and cost of labor made art less a matter of aesthetics than wealth, at least for the patron.) In this context Los Caprichos is even more bizarre–Goya completely rejects the institution by which he was raised, trained, and employed. It’s not even a matter of leaving it behind; he openly mocks it in the prints, almost brutally tearing down the Church, the monarchy, the elite, and the Inquisition. The change is so abrupt it’s rather extraordinary, with or without taking into account the circumstances in Goya’s personal life.

There’s no question as to the merit of My Name Is Red–the interweaving of narrators is masterful, the description is breathtaking, and the mystery creates a tense but subtle suspense throughout the work. However, I don’t think we’ve talked much about the fact that this is, of course, a translated work. And while it’s clear that Pamuk is writing for an international audience and consistently brings the audience into enough of a cultural understanding that the work doesn’t feel displaced, I still find myself wondering what was lost in translating the original Turkish to English.

But My Name is Red is a particularly interesting case study when it comes to translation, since it’s a book about art–and art supposedly ought to transcend cultural divides in ways that language can’t. But neither art nor language exist in a vacuum, and my personal lack of historical context and the book’s translation make me wonder if I’m reading this through a doubly refracted lens. Of course, this is a remarkably self-aware text, and it’s difficult to imagine that Pamuk failed to anticipate foreign rights sales.

What I found most interesting about the Tres Riches Heures was the collaborative aspect. The idea of three men working as a single entity on a project was, to me, the most foreign and antiquated aspects of this particular Book of Hours. Since both writing and illustrating have overwhelmingly come to be seen as solitary activities, it’s difficult to imagine the Limbourg brothers’ process, and perhaps this is the heart of the reason that illuminated manuscripts seem almost outlandish to us today.

Orham Pamuk’s My Name is Red gets at this point as well, particularly in its method of narration. With myriad narrators from a corpse to a murderer to a tree, Pamuk paints the process of illumination–and by extent, creation–as a combined effort. Art and writing was less about individual focus than group determination, a deeply and intimately collaborative process that moved from the patron’s order to the sheep farmer to the parchment maker to the calligrapher to the illuminator (or illuminators) to the book binder and back to the patron. This is not to say that the modern book is of more or less value, but certainly it passes through far fewer hands before it’s sold.

I thought Secret of the Kells was absolutely beautiful. What I most appreciated was the effort to echo the laborious art of illumination in the animation. The animators clearly took elements from traditional celtic art into account, and the subtle influences made for a bold and clean feature that was a pleasure to watch. The example that comes immediately to mind is the climactic battle between Brendan and the Crom Cruach, wherein the body of Crom Cruach forms a pattern similar to those found on the borders of Irish illuminated manuscripts. To me, it felt reminiscent of Disney’s Hercules, or even Mulan, but with a more direct and explicit intent (and perhaps a little less appropriation).

More than that, however, it also takes the elements of traditional illumination, both stylistically and in spirit. The attention to detail, the juxtaposition of light and dark, and the sense of mystery, history, and dedication inherent in the animation all echo the subject of the film–illumination.