When Art Critiques Go Wrong

I was perusing the long-defunct "Notes" section of my Facebook account today when I unearthed this gem from a few years ago; to be precise, from the 6th of October, 2011. I recall sitting down for an art history class called "The Critical Viewer" and being informed by a classmate that Steve Jobs had died of cancer. So naturally the lecture hall was abuzz by the time the prof walked in, calmed us down, and got the class rolling. He started by throwing this photo up on the screen...

Our task was to form small groups and come up with supposed commonly accepted and alternate views on the meaning behind this image. The later didn't have to be feasible; we could interpret the picture however we chose. I must have been in some kinda mood that morning because I may have let this one get a little out of hand. As recorded in my Facebook note from that day (with some belated proofreading):

"We begin with McDonald's. McDonald's is probably the most blatant, the ultimate, symbol of American consumerism and capitalist corporate business society. Now, a very large portion of corporate profits goes towards military funding; America has the world's single most potent military force, an accomplishment they have fought much opposition to achieve. Now, the McDonald's symbol on the crab-like creature is upside down in this image, and so becomes the middle initial of President Bush. George W. was born on July 6th, under the astrological sign of the crab, Cancer. Bush's invasion of the Middle East coupled with America's social values of excess have greatly impacted the Muslim world, and many conservative Islamic people refer to America as "The Great Satan", a term embodied in the horned top of the crab. Let's move on to the ketchup creature thing. There is a saying that only two things will survive a nuclear holocaust: cockroaches, and the Chinese. This cockroach form is clearly representative of China, especially in the politically-charged military context I will get to momentarily. The cockroach is red, with a distinct little yellow crescent on it, a symbol of the communist power with the ability to survive nuclear war. The other half of this military reference is the crab's shadow, which mimics the form of Sputnik and is a symbol of Soviet Russia and the Cold War arms race. Both Soviet Russia (shown to be merely a "shadow of the past") and Communist China have opposed and threatened America in its rise to power, but now they are portrayed as weak; one is a fleeting, insubstantial shadow while the other cowers beneath the powerful predatory stance of corporate America.

Now, in case you aren't convinced of the validity of this argument, allow me to prove to you three more ways in which the crab made of french fries represents America. Firstly, it stands for corporate America, and this is where it gets creepy. Some of you may be aware that Steve Jobs, the CEO and founder of Apple Inc., died yesterday. He was head of a corporation that landed at number 35 on 2011's Fortune 500, a significant player in the American economy. Now, that crab is made of fries, and fries are made from potatoes. They are, decidedly, "French" fries, and the French term for potato is "Pomme de Terre"..."Apple of the Earth". Apple. Now like I said, Steve Jobs died today. Of cancer. Which, as I have already told you, is the sign of the crab.

Now secondly, it stands for imperialist America. The Roman eagle, the symbol of the Legions and of the power of the Roman Empire, was adopted by America upon its constitution. The eagle was tradionally made of bronze if it were to be carried on campaign, gold for ceremonial purposes. Both of these metals are yellow or distinctly yellowish, dependent on their quality. So what in this image stands out as yellow? Well, the fries, and the three points of the "W". If you count up those points there are eight legs, two 'arms', and the three prongs of the letter, you get thirteen. There were thirteen colonies brought into Constitution in 1787, the first States of America.

And lastly, it represents America's international efforts to remain a step ahead of all their competition. I have been calling the larger figure in this image a "crab" up until this point, but I seemed to be one of few who saw it that way in class. Most people referred to as a "spider", and it definitely can come across that way. It has eight legs, and is certainly predatory. So let us work with the spider for a bit. Spiders in many cultural muthologies are the tricksters. They are the only living creature that sets a constructed trap and lies in wait for its prey to snare itself. Out of this devious characteristic have risen legends like Anansi as well as ficticious constructions like Tolkien's Ungoliant and Shelob. The creature in the image bears all these connotations. The crab also carries a distinctly engineered skeletal feel to it's composition, and this is no acident. The Central Intelligence Agency is rumoured to have been founded by members of a secret society at Yale University called Skull and Bones, the members of which are referred to as Bonesmen. The CIA is responsible for feeding intelligence to the American military, as well as conducting operations within allied and opposing countries to plant and manipulate information. In short, the Agency sets traps, spins webs, and then waits for someone to fall in. As well, George W. Bush is a known alumni of the Bonesmen. Coincidence? Perhaps..."

Don't worry; I'm well aware of how inaccurate parts of that spiel are, and the blustering bravado of the young art student that saturates my words (or in Art Spiegelman's words, "the Artist as a Young %@&*!", which I was). But it's a fun bit of nostalgia to look back on and a ridiculous glimpse into my brain, and now it's your ridiculous glimpse into my brain.

You're welcome.

Hercules: Meta-myth and Mockery

I took yesterday evening to watch Hercules, the latest installment in this decade's Greek mythology blockbuster rampage. And it was alright, as a film. It was corny as hell, packed with oiled musculature, two-dimensional characters, and over-the-top, predominantly bloodless violence. It was pretty, that's for sure. It was also an immense disappointment. I watched this film to experience a legend that has existed in the Western consciousness for thousands of years, a core part of the mythology of the ancient Greeks. Even as a modern, Canadian kid the story of Hercules and his twelve labours was one of the first I knew. The Nemean Lion, the Hydra, this son of the gods and the monsters he defeated by his supernatural strength. I could go on, but you know the stories, right? They're with you, too. Those are the stories I expected to see on screen, as I suspect you will as well. The trouble is, those stories aren't there.

What the film offers us is a flimsy frame-narrative-esque structure, introduced and concluded by the voice of a storyteller (Amphiaraus) who is also a character in the main story (a seer laden with stoner references), but including a second storyteller character (Iolaus) whose role is essentially to propagate exaggerated stories about the feats of Hercules. He's the hapless spin doctor for this party of adventurers, all of whom are well aware that they're riding on the legendary reputation of...a man, and nothing more. The movie runs through the Twelve Labours of Hercules in its first five minutes, short, epic bursts of battles with The Nemean Lion, The Lernaean Hydra, The Erymanthian Boar, before cutting to Iolaus who is clearly telling these stories with the intent of putting the fear of the gods into the crew of pirates who have him prepped for a gravity-assisted castration. As the film progresses it becomes apparent that not one of those deeds was what the stories made it out to be. Iolaus only role here as a character, despite his place in Grek mythology as a great hero, is to provide comic relief while making a mockery of the cultural role of Storyteller. That reverential position, this movie says, was actually occupied by hacks and opportunistic frauds. It even mocks the viewer, offering glimpses of real wonder before revealing them for optical illusions or plain old craziness. How silly you were to believe in that! The lion and the boar were nothing but monstrous wild animals. The visions of Cerberus that haunt Hercules are, in the end, flashbacks to a drug-induced hallucination during an attack by three wolves. A scene which has Hercules returning to court bearing the heads of the Hydra in a sack takes a turn for the mundane when he pulls King Eurystheus aside and reveals the severed heads of men wearing snake masks. No wonder, he says, the people thought it was a many-headed monster terrorizing the villages. By the time the film is finished with the Labours of Hercules, the story resembles nothing so much as an episode of Scooby Doo.

It's a wonder that the lion skin doesn't have a zipper on it

The result of all this is that the story isn't offering us true mythology, but rather "meta mythology". This term may already exist in academic discourse, but I can't seem to find a concrete definition of it so I'll adopt it for this article. Rather than tell us the stories that the Greeks were telling the filmmakers have opted to tell us their "what actually happened" version, a behind-the-scenes to Greek mythology. What actually happened, they would have us believe, is that a couple of storytellers pulled the wool over the eyes of a whole culture of suckers, and that the stories those poor saps believed went on to become the most enduring narrative tradition in the Western world. This does the storytellers of old a great disservice; it takes Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Hesiod and the rest for utter fools. It waters down their tales into propagandist drivel while preaching a modern, individualist message of "the strength within" that has no bearing on the stories it claims to adapt. The film closes with Amphiaraus narrating; he asks rhetorically, "Was Hercules the son of Zeus? I don't think it really matters."

Doesn't it, though?

In the latter half of the 1930s, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel were working their arses off in Cleveland to work the kinks out of a character they were calling "Superman". The premise of the character was that he was part adventure hero, part science fiction wonder, part biblical figure, part sideshow strongman. He was Charles Atlas, Doc Savage, Moses, and Flash Gordon rolled into one. Nobody has ever come along and proposed that these two Jewish kids were delusional and actually believed in the character they were writing, nor that the millions of fans who have grown to love the stories of Superman over the years are all hapless saps who are falling for some elaborate farce. It is well recognized and widely accepted that Superman is two things. First, he is fictional. Second, he embodies the cultural values of his creators and reflects the context within which he was made. Why we can so easily accept this about superheroes and be utterly clueless about ancient myth is beyond me.

Now, imagine a Superman movie that takes the Hercules route. Imagine DC making a movie that starts out as Superman, but slowly reveals that he's not bulletproof, he just wears Kevlar all the time. He's performed some crazy staged stunts in Metropolis to win the favour of the people, making sure nobody gets hurt. As a newspaper reporter he's spinning his own image, expanding his own feats in print to cultivate a legendary persona. He's even hired stunt doubles so he can be reported "saving" people at impossibly separate location around the city. "Was Superman actually Kryptonian? I don't think it really matters." Remember, viewer! Because he believes he's a hero, he really is. Oh, and DC announces at Comicon that this version of the character is now official canon.

People would hate that movie.

At this point, go read this article about the nature of mythology by Joshua Unruh. It's great, which is why I'm going to quote him heavily. Josh focuses on the point that this movie deliberately circumvented, that the power of mythology comes from the values that the stories communicate through their figures.

Mythology’s primary purpose was never to explain how but instead to explain why. To give a meaning to the world outside the window that had absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of how things worked. 

As I’ve said too many times, mythology is the stories a culture tells about itself. Nobody who does any scholarship about myths sees them as serious attempts to explain the natural world except in the broadest, most philosophical sense. They are educational tools meant to tell someone within the culture how to behave within the culture, how to excel in the culture, and what to beware about the culture...  

To assume that these stories so full of profound cultural relevance and revelation (and constantly refilled and re-revealed for each new culture that discovers them) are just what the poor simpleton ancient people used as “science” is to miss utterly the point of them. It also makes you a bigot against everybody who lived on this world before you.

There is no self-reflexivity in Greek myth. Homer didn't write The Odyssey with quantifying statements of, "or so it is said". It is simply written as though it happened, and when the audience willingly suspends their disbelief the stories become a window onto the world. So, what drives a writer to want to suck the power out of a cultural narrative? Maybe pride, the "Anachronistic Elitism" Unruh proposes (We modern folk can have our heroes, but damned if we'll let you primitive savages keep yours!). Or maybe it's some postmodern need to refresh a story by deconstructing it.  I don't know for sure, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

In the end the film loses any power it could have had by slipping into ambiguity. By this point we all know the monsters were fake, the stories were lies, there are no gods, and Hercules is just a man...but damn is he strong. Like, mythically strong, to the point where he topples a monumental statue of Hera and brings down the temple, just by putting his back into it (remember, he was able to do this because he believed in himself). This is the one moment in the film when you feel like you might actually be witnessing a mythic feat, even if collapsing the temple on top of your wrongdoers with strength granted by the gods feels more like Samson than Hercules. At the same time, it's mundane. The wrath of the patron goddess upon her city is reduced to the sheer ballistic energy of her massive marble head as it careens down the temple stairs and obliterates the corrupt king. The movie ends up being about a war, a people who believe in a bunch of crazy fairy tales, and one really buff guy with a great motivation speaker. The result is nothing short of insulting to one of the richest narrative traditions in human history.

The Artist's Voice: Rachel Dukes on Creative Credit and Exposure

There's a lot of crap that pisses art students off. We're an angsty bunch, the whole lot of us, griping about professors giving us poor critiques and wine bottles that run dry too fast (not to perpetuate stereotypes, but...) Anyway, we like to complain. Some of us would even claim that such disenfranchisement with the world at large is what drives their artistic practice, that they're pouring their soul out onto their canvas, dripping long streams of oil paint as if it were the lifeblood of society being sacrificed in Art for the good of Humanity.

Thank goodness I'm only a humble cartoonist.

One of these complaints is significantly marginalized. It lacks, by and large, a voice, though there are certainly a number of us who sit around and whine about it. It's a line we are fed on a weekly if not daily basis:

"It'll be good exposure."

...which is the world's way of saying "Look here, I need something drawn, or painted on, or otherwise creatively endowed, and all I can do is stick figures. So, if you wouldn't mind pouring your heart and soul into this until it's up to my standards, I won't pay you per se, but I'm sure somebody will see it eventually and wonder who made that." Oh, thank you. Then I'll get another person asking me for free art. Wonderful.

It's not an uncommon problem. There's definitely a part of me that wishes society would develop an Italian Renaissance mentality toward artists and just view us as one more craftsman to be hired. Instead we get funny looks when we tell people we're artists, and lines like, "Yeah, I used to draw a lot in high school." There's this overwhelming assumption that what we do isn't actually work. We must love every second, and it must comes as naturally and easily to us as breathing, and therefore it's not worth paying for. So when Tom Spurgeon posted this earlier this month, it kinda clicked.

The article that Rachel Dukes (Mixtape Comics) wrote about uncredited work making its way across the vast reaches of the internet is pure gold. It picks out all the key points in detail, nails down exactly why artists are getting screwed online. You see, it's a little tricky to get "good exposure" if nobody knows who made the thing they're looking at. Just doesn't work.

Dukes' article is a little stats-heavy, but so very much worth reading. The numbers are the real one-two punch, an overwhelming bit of insight on just how much we don't care about stealing other folks' creative work. On the one hand, I can't even count the number of images I have saved on my computer that have no credit attached to them, and on the other, I'm paranoid about my own portfolio and whether or not you can copy/save my images from it. And I have to wonder, am I going about this all wrong? Art school does some strange things to you. It tells you that you have to sell your work if you're going to get out there, build a successful practice for yourself after graduation...and it tells you that work made in class that is commercially viable is a sell-out, not worth academic consideration, not worth making. It tells us that we should make money and protect our image rights, while offering us opportunities to donate work and volunteer our skills for exposure. We have the unique opportunity to get our education in a burbling melting-pot of mixed messages. Ain't we lucky?

So, I won't pretend to have the answers. This is more of a critique, which is to say I'm taking an issue and bitching about it, this is good, this is bad, this could use improvement, and I love what you did with the green in that corner, it adds a sense of life...yeah, don't mind me, just putting my degree to good use. But give it some thought. Think about what you can do in your online life to give true exposure to the multitude of artists and graphics people whose work we enjoy every day. If it means doing a little searching to figure where a cartoon originated, it's worth the time. For Art, yeah?

The money isn't’t the point. But this is a thing that’s happening. This isn't’t just happening to me. It’s actively happening to the greater art community as a whole. (Especially the comics community. Recent artists effected by altered artwork/theft off the top of my head: Liz Prince, Luke Healy, Nation of Amanda, Melanie Gillman, etc.) Our work is being stolen and profited off of. Right this second.
I do my best to see the positive in these events but the very least I can do as a creator is stand up in this small moment and say “This is mine. I made this.”- Rachel Dukes

The Article: http://mixtapecomics.tumblr.com/post/68277854434/after-a-discussion-last-week-with-several-of-my

Cheers!
Asher

pretentious Art School nugget

How I was inspired by Art - A Story

The way I see it, there are a lot of different ways to tell a story. But that's old news.

This goes beyond the statement, "There are a lot of stories to be told", which is equally true and an entirely different conundrum for the narrative artist, be they writer, sculptor, painter, or cartoonist. Picking which story to tell isn't even half the battle. It might be a third of the battle, potentially a quarter. The thing is, after you have your story chosen you have to decide how you're going to tell that story. This stage is half the battle, you know, give or take. For me, this half of the battle has been the focus of the past three months. I blame Art Spiegelman.

Seeing Spiegelman's retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery this past summer changed something in the way I think about the comics production process. His work filled an entire floor of the gallery gallery building with cut-and-pasted montages of wackily painted caricatures from his RAW days, sobering inked pages from Maus, and a few gorgeously composed pages that were more than a series of panels, they were a single, cohesive masterwork appearing as a sequence of images bleeding into, through, and over each other in flawless harmony. I wish I could remember where those were from.

It sparked a paradigm shift. Drawing has ceased to be the sole method; ink has ceased to be the sole medium. My brain has started to roam around an open realm of ideas and media searching for alternate ways to make a comic, picking through piles of previously discarded materials until finds something usable and then dropping it back into my consciousness, spawning spontaneous and unexpected project ideas. for example, waking up one morning to a thought: "I should make a comic set entirely on sofas.", accompanied by a fully formed plan of a photo collage process with figures drawn into the black & white photo settings with conte crayon and brush pens. Granted, these ideas are still taking baby steps. They may be innovative to me, but they are a far cry from being drastic leaps in progress for the medium. I'm not not pushing any boundaries when I write my text on card-stock and glue in over a drawing instead of drawing a speech bubble into the panel. All I'm doing is pushing myself a little further out of my box of naivety, and that's bloody good enough for me.

Life is like an Inkwell: messy, and full of pens

Oi. It's early, I'm tired, and I should be reading Kandinsky for my art history class but I'd rather sit here and drink coffee and screendump at you.

Figured I'd write out a bunch of the stuff that's going on in my life as an art student right now, partly to inform you and mostly as an entirely self-serving way to organize my thoughts on everything I have to get done in the next couple weeks. I have my first Fourth-year midterm critique coming up a week from tomorrow, which is a tad intimidating. I get to sit down with the two profs coordinating the Fourth-year class and my personal advisor, the ever so lovely and intensely critical Dr. Jodey Castricano, and show them what I've produced this year thus far. Therein lies the rub: I don't think I've turned out nearly enough work to warrant, or at least support, a solid critique. So I'm cranking the throttle on production this week. I'm going to scribble like mad for a couple days, and then put down my pens and venture boldly into the metal shop where I shall make like a blacksmith and get dirty. I have significant amounts of welding to finish before Wednesday. Likely I'll work through the weekend, seeing as I've been put on political cartoon duty at the newspaper and assigned the task of doing next issue's cover (going to print on Sunday, so, there goes my weekend). Monday I must make a serious attempt to get some sleep, because Tuesday I will be...

...taking on Scott McCloud's 24 hour comic book challenge.

I'll be starting at 1 PM on Tuesday and finishing at 1 PM on Wednesday. Which is when my midterm critique starts. Because you know going full-throttle at the drawing table with no sleep for 24 consecutive hours and ending with your first big critique of the year is going to result in some interesting feedback. I intend to have a book for them to read when they arrive for the critique. There's also a chance that I'll be a cantankerous shmo.

So, what're we at: 24-hour challenge, metal shop, newspaper cartoons, midterm critique...ah, term papers. Here. This is the library that is my studio right now:

Yeah. I'm turning this block of cellulose knowledge into two term papers. One will be looking at Jewish culture in America in the early years of the 20th century and trying to understand why the rapidly urbanizing world in that particular place at that particular time with those particular people was the perfect storm that created the Superhero. Why not Paris? Why not Russia? And by the end of the month I have to have an abstract written up so I can submit a proposal for that paper to the PCA. Keeping my digits crossed on that one. The other term paper is taking the form of a comic, because I've been lucky enough to work with academics who are open to me taking that road. I'll be tackling issues of gender and violence and the gaze in Islamic culture, which frankly unnerves me. It's not content that I'm comfortable with, and it's nothing I've ever approached in my art practice before now. But I'm here in this program to get myself out of my comfort zone, so ONWARD!! Into an ink spattered and sleepless unknown where stories crawl out of the realm of informed imagination and make their home in a sketchbook wilderness ruled by a woodland king named Coffee. 

My life is awesome.