Author: Xenia Tiajoloff

What I appreciated the most out of this comic book was Mazzucchelli’s constant play of form. Many times when I picture a comic, a rather linear image come to mind. This is not to say that it is black and white, there are colors of course, but most important to the visual conjuring of a comic is the element of the line. Every cartoon character I grew up with— Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, to name a few popular ones— all characteristically had black outlines around the characters as well as around the scenery. This black line was iconic and necessary to the comic or so I thought. In various scenes throughout Mazzucchelli’s book, the black line is substituted for a varying color, which was not as brilliant as the complete erasure of the outline of a figure to create form atmosphere. In class we looked at the two pages in which Mazzucchelli depicts the student siren, and the interesting moment for me lay in the fact that the figure is created entirely out of solid forms. It left me thinking, in theory does this cross us over to the fine art world? European rationalism and artistic nature for hundreds of years—  until the return of the brush stroke in Impressionism—  fought against the line. Illusionistic painting could dnot be done impressively if the man made line is present. Italian Renaissance painting intended to ultimately hide the sketch line or fresco outlines so that the figure could be consumed visually as one form. Mazzucchelli plays with color and form to create shape out of void spaces. One such example is the siren’s face in her reclining pose. She face was not drawn with the linear conventions of comics but rather built by shaping it out of the void background with forms as hair and blankets. It was that juxtaposition between void and space, form and color, that caught my eye and blurred the lines between “low” comics and “high” art.

*Warning, this was a post that was sitting as a draft because I forgot to click publish. Feel free to ignore this this week*

I am happy that you made us pick up a Gorrey book. It wouldn’t have been an art book I think I would have ever picked up. It looks too dark for something for me to pick up as a kid, which is a good thing it seems. But there is this simplicity and lightness to the work that I believe calls for its best medium to be in animation. The short clip you showed in class of the beginning to the PBS mystery series demonstrated how naturally comedic Gorrey’s characters are. To leave them stagnate in the print almost does these wonderfully creepy and endearing characters a disservice. To animate them is to add a bit more absurdity: in the exaggerated stiff animation and the bright off kilter sound effects and musical background.

*Warning, this was a post that was sitting as a draft because I forgot to click publish. Feel free to ignore this this week*

It was actually the discussion we had on Monday in class that inspired my topic for my final paper for this class. I appreciated the discussion in which we commented on whether or not the female figure in Ernst’s Monday book has an agency of her own when her face is obscured by the shell. This to me spoke at the heart of what the surrealist movement is most about. The propagation of the stereotype of the femme-fatale and other sexualized images of the female identity were widely ingrained in surrealism. In fact, Salvador Dalí’s pieces, often promoted through a rather benign perspective of dreamscapes to audiences today, confront a deep seated fear of the female identity and her sexuality. His piece “The Great Masturbator” of 1929, depicts a monstrous glob of a female body painted with symbols the denote an inherent sexualization of the female and also a fear. Her face is drawn near the genitalia of a clothed but exposed male body (TANGENT: interesting thought, but again I would offer the idea that the headless male figure holds more agency that the bodiless figure of the woman. He stands erect and present where as the woman has her eyes closed and he head is cocked in a way that suggests she is begging or insatiably desiring the male form). By her breasts rests a lily, whose cylindrical crevice takes on the idenity of the vaginal canal. An army of ants walk along the folds of the mass from which the female protrudes, suggesting an unrelenting “itch” that needs to scratch. Yet amid these sexualized images, the perverse is not forgotten. A fly clutches the stomach region, performing fellatio on what can be construed as either an udder, a phallus, or a nose. A skeletal like man is painted in the desert background, appearing to have no understanding that this monster lives before him. This painting is rather disturbing, and so little discussed in the general teaching of surreality.

I enjoyed speaking to Yun-Fei Ji. There are very few times art history students are provided the opportunity to speak to artists and understand the thought that goes behind much of the work. There is always the misconception that art historians often over analyze the work, or insinuate themes and ideas that were never intended by the artist to exist in the work. I appreciated how he spoke about the fact that he works his paintings up to their final stage, in direct contrast to the intentionalism ink paintings traditionally embraces. Yun-Fei’s candor in his indecisiveness, in his thematic uncertainty in his art’s developmental stages was interesting to hear, because in some ways it proves that many times people impose what they want to see onto contemporary art in its analysis. But at the same time, his belief that the art is a social project, as something to start discourse, proves that perhaps the uncertainty is purposeful and art is supposed to have perhaps unrelated concepts imposed on it to see how the piece evolves its meaning.

Yes, the movie was a bit weird. Yes, the movie was surreal with its winding time line. But there were two smaller stylistic decisions that attracted my attention- one for the betterment of the film and the other as a distraction. A brilliance on the film is the use of shadow and darkness within the bedroom scenes. Where as many times the outside world is lit significantly softer, in a pastel pallet. It is reminiscent of Goya palette within his court painting, and stirred a fair amount of emotion, which is his fingerprint upon the Spain art scene.

The stylistic choice I had the largest issue with was the disparaging interplay between a contemporary aesthetic and the romantic empire style of the set. When Goys interacts with the outside world either in his memory or in his current time, the style is historically detailed. However, there are scenes in which Goys enters his own mind, either speaking with himself in the past or future, and at that moment we find ourselves within a set with distinct and clear contrast between a utter blackness and a graphic representation of Los Caprichos for example. These images, and their source of inspiration/imagination were not molded into any wondrous dreamscape. Rather they were plopped down into place outside of time or place, outside of any contextual setting and blown up in a presentational style that would suit instillation art, not the mind of a 19th century artist. They were plotted down into an empty mind dressed as a blacked-out sound stage.

My immediate reaction to the Goya Los Caprichos prints were their uncanny resemblance to political cartoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They both are founded in reality, take liberties in bodily proportions, and equate human fallacy to animals.

I feel very often we also forget that the all surrounding and rather immediate visual culture is quite new. For a few hundred years, people did not have access to images readily until the invention of etching and printing, at which point these images were the only visual connection people had to the world. These were their photographs. For this reason, I am surprised by the surreality of Goya’s aquatints. Although I do find flaws in them compositionally and technically, I appreciate is integration of imagination with reality. There are times where people or clothing is depicted wonderfully, but then include at the same time mannerist choices in facial structure and body positioning. Also similar to the surrealist movement just over a century in the future, the use of cultural or dream —or nightmare— symbolism is adamant, particularly in Plate 43. For something that acted as one of the very limited ways through which people saw the world, this combination of reality and surreality is intriguing and colorful.

I really enjoyed this exercise because I appreciated the meditative nature of the work. I was noticing that on the whole, the class chose to magnify their letter to fill the majority of the page, which I think was clever considering the water color is effectively impossible to control in small spaces or on wet paper. However, I chose to make mine in miniature scale because I wanted to see what that was like. Aside from having to pick up a lot pigment to thicken the paint for an semblance of control, the focus and energy it takes to work on such a small scale is enormous. It was centering because it was a creative reflective activity, and simultaneously performative because the need for perfection under the  understanding that the illumination will be viewed by someone.

I have a very small comment to make that isn’t particularly revolutionary, but I would still like to point it out. What I appreciated about this book the most was the formatting of each chapter as if it itself was an illumination. A single miniature is not capable of describing at length an entire story. What miniatures attempt to do is allude to the complicated nature of the scene with transcendent motifs including color and body language. What it can do well is depict a single scene in clarity and detail in order to present the fullest picture of a single event.

The book’s small chapters act as small vignettes into the story in a similar manner as the illuminated miniatures. Pamuk writes in a exorbitant amount of detail into his chapters, with each  chapter transforming into a miniature. As with a miniature, he provides only enough in each chapter that we as readers picture that which is being described in the image, but are reliant on the next chapter for another detailed image to weave into the one another. Motifs like the image of an unlucky dog transcend the boundaries of the chapter ends, binding the story together and grounding the plot and characters within a greater symbolic culture.