Visual Arts
Art Education in Canadian Museums
This collection considers how Canadian art educators are engaging with a new range of approaches to museum education and why educators are responding to 21st century challenges in ways that are unique to Canada.
Organized into three sections this collection reconceptualizes museums to consider accessibility differences in
lived experiences and how practices create impactful change.
With the overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives authors consider methodological philosophical experiential and aesthetic forms of inquiry in regional museum contexts from coast-to-coast-to-coast that bring forward innovative theoretical standpoints with practice-based projects in museums articulating how museums are shifting and why museums are evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Informed by social justice perspectives and as catalysts for public scholarship each chapter is passionate in addressing the mobilization of equity diversity and inclusivity (EDI) in relation to practices in the field.
By weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within situated and localized social and cultural communities the authors present a distinct socio-political discourse at the heart of teaching and learning. Rupturing preconceived ideas and sedimentary models they suggest a discourse of living futures is already upon us in museums and in art education.
Propositions for Museum Education
From the perspective of art educators museum education is shifting to a new paradigm which this collection showcases and marks as threshold moments of change underway internationally. The goal in drawing together international perspectives is to facilitate deeper thinking making and doing practices central to museum engagement across global local and glocal contexts.
Museums as cultural brokers facilitate public pedagogies and the dispositions and practices offered in 33 chapters from 19 countries articulate how and why collections enact responsibility in public exchange
leading cultural discourses of empowerment in new ways. Organized into five sections a wide range of topics and arts-based modes of inquiry imagine new possibilities concerning theory-practice sustainability of educational partnerships and communities of practice with in and through artwork scholarship.
Chapters diverse in issues art forms and museum orientations are well-situated within museum studies enlarging discussions with trans-topographies (transdisciplinary transnational translocal and more) as critical directions for art educators.
Authors impart collective diversity through richly textured exposés first-person accounts essays and visual essays that enfold cultural activism sustainable practices and experimental teaching and learning alongside transformative exhibitions all while questioning – Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing?
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art
Some have called this an age of absurdity and as such Contemporary Absurdities Existential Crises and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists theorists and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of a tactic for and a subject in the contemporary.
The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it rather than flee from it are thereby introduced to the political writ large.
This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful potentially radical tool within the contemporary.
Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes performative politics and art expressing the
confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.
Square Eyes: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom and Things
This paper explores Anna Mill and Luke Jones’ Square Eyes (2018) through the combined lenses of Thing Theory and Boredom Studies articulating how the latent stuff of boredom might resist the anxious shocks of Surveillance Capitalism. A vision of a near-future augmented reality (AR) dystopia Square Eyes focuses its gaze on the subject of distraction ennui and alienation in a city which is both concrete and virtual. By layering drawings text and transparent colour washes and breaking the borders of the panel Mill and Jones explore the interplay of vision and touch in representing a multimodal AR environment which is both stimulating and profoundly boring:
Fin: I’m just bored of looking… At all this stuff-
George: Um… Are you talking about… Reality?(2018: 2–3)
Mark Fisher argues that the mediating smartphone has replaced boredom with ‘a seamless flow of low-level stimulus’ (Fisher 2014). I argue our protagonist's resistance to this state of suspended affect allows for the radical disruptive potential of boredom outlined by Fisher and others (Kracauer 1929; Petro 2002).
In Frederic Jameson's words boredom provides ‘a very useful instrument with which to explore the past and to stage meaning between it and the present’ (Jameson 1991) and in this paper I argue that the haptic engagement with the digital present and concrete past of the city in Square Eyes allows for a fascinating dialogue with urban materiality. If Bill Brown identifies a more-than-human world where ‘[objects] are tired of our longing. They are tired of us’ (Brown 2001) Square Eyes’ permeable gutter allows the subject and the thing to join in revolt and experience radical boredom and thingness in multiple modes.
Spiegelman's Magic Box: MetaMaus and the Archive of Representation
The 2011 publication of MetaMaus which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maus’ publication continued Art Spiegelman's long-standing preoccupation with creating an archive of his own fraught process of representation. While the difficulties of representing his father's experiences during the Holocaust were foregrounded in the representational strategies of his acclaimed two-volume graphic novel Maus they continued to haunt Spiegelman even after the book's publication. In 1991 a museum exhibit ‘The Road to Maus’ displayed the layers involved in Maus’ creation. In 1994 Spiegelman developed The Complete Maus CD-ROM an interactive digital archive of Maus. And in 2011 Spiegelman published MetaMaus which combines reflection on and documentation of the process of representing Maus. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's and Giorgio Agamben's theorizations of the archive this chapter explores the different kinds of archival work that Maus and MetaMaus do. Both Derrida and Agamben call attention to the traditional archive's exclusion of affective traces of the past. The chapter suggests that Maus and MetaMaus function as archives of the ‘after-effects’ of the Holocaust. As Maus so effectively demonstrates the Holocaust did not end with the conclusion of World War II; its effects continue to be felt decades later by the survivors as well as by their children who did not experience the events ‘first-hand’. Whereas traditional histories of the Holocaust narrate events that took place between 1933 and 1945 Maus depicts those events along with the difficulties of responding to and representing them. In documenting the process of representing Maus MetaMaus invites a rethinking of what counts as history and by extension what counts as an archive.
The Musicalization of Graphic Narratives and P. Craig Russell's Graphic Novel Operas, ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Salomé’
The term ‘musicalization’ comes from Werner Wolf's study of intermediality between music and fiction The Musicalization of Fiction (1999) which proposes the musicalized text as one that has an intentional and sustained connection to music and musical form that moves beyond the purely diegetic or incidental. In this chapter I draw on Wolf's arguments to consider the potential for ‘musicalization’ within graphic narratives interrogating comics both as a unique medium and through a comparative analysis with the operations of time space rhythm repetition harmony dissonance polyphony and narrativity in music. I explore these ideas further in a close analysis of two of P. Craig Russell's graphic novel operas The Magic Flute (1989–90) and Salomé (1986) which I present as tentative examples of musicalized graphic narratives. These graphic novel operas draw on the affinities that we find between music and comics to translate their musical source texts into graphic narratives through the use of medium-specific tools e.g. manipulations of the panel and the grid visual approximations of sound and grammatextuality. This research highlights a long-standing desire among comic writers and artists to represent music in their work and demonstrates the rich connections between music and graphic narratives which can facilitate more nuanced representations moving forward.
The Shape of Comic Book Reading
In most comics the art and the text – the visual and the verbal channels – seem to be telling the same story. But to be technical in a narratological approach it is actually the same fabula not the same story which requires a uniform perspective. That is both art and text present events from the same general plot but not necessarily at the same time in the same order or from the same viewpoint. The captions may be disclosing a character's inner monologue for instance while the panels show that character leaping to safety. Or as a reverse example word balloons could be vocalizing a fight between two off-panel parents while the panel focalizes on a tearful child trying to sleep. It is the dreadfully boring and narrow comic that has the visual and verbal reflect exactly the same thing in each and every panel. There would be no point and ultimately no reason for doing this narrative in comic form. Since the visual and the verbal narratives may be telling different parts of the same fabula simultaneously it stands to reason that there may also be two different narrators for a given panel as well. This distinction becomes particularly important when it is taken advantage of by a savvy creator (e.g. Art Spiegelman in MAUS Alan Moore in Watchmen and Chris Ware in ACME Novelty Library) to create an intentional schism between the two narratives; that is the visual and verbal narratives may actually be spinning different yarns. This narrative polyphony though not unique to comics affects the hermeneutic model for the medium to such a degree that a revised tetrahedral hybrid of Wolfgang Iser J. Espen Aarseth and Scott McCloud's theories bears implementation.
Sound Affects: Visualizing Music, Musicians, and (Sub)cultural Identity in BECK and Scott Pilgrim
This chapter discusses the portrayal of popular music in comics as a product of sensory and emotive experience as well as a determinant of social identity and labour. To this end it focuses on the Japanese serialized manga BECK and the Canadian graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim. These two works offer comparable perspectives on music and the social mythos of musicianship as well as sharing similar young male protagonists and social contexts despite their disparate settings in Tokyo and Toronto respectively. Through a comparative reading of these texts this analysis examines contemporary comic book techniques as well as the cross-cultural dynamics of Japanese and Anglo-American comic book cultures specifically with regard to the portrayal of workers in fields of cultural production. In order to examine their interrelated depictions of music as both sensorial experience and enactment of collective identity I draw on the canon of comic book semiotics established by Scott McCloud Ian Hague and others to examine the techniques employed by these texts in communicating music as an emotive sensorial experience. In particular I will concentrate on their use of diagrammatic techniques and visual caricature as a means of communicating music – not through attempted synaesthetic effects but rather through emotive evocation. Second I look at their representation of musicianship as an area in which the mythology of artistic entrepreneurialism coexists with imperatives of collective identity and lifestyle. I examine the sociologically idiosyncratic manner in which these comics reflect and build upon these mythologies through the filters of class cultural and generational identity creating narratives that at times perpetuate – and at others subvert – the grand entrepreneurial narratives ascribed to musicianship within contemporary neo-liberal notions of creative labour.
Intertwining Verbal and Visual Elements in Printed Narratives for Adults
In the course of print history only a few successful models of image and word-alliances (e.g. comics picture books) developed while other types remained rather marginal. This chapter tries to argue why such different and experimental works as What a Life! (Lucas and Morrow 1911) La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France/Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France (Cendars and Delaunay 1913) Dynamik der Gross-Stadt/Dynamics of a Metropolis (Moholy-Nagy 1925) La Cantatrice Chauve/The Bold Soprano (Ionesco and Massin 1964) La Toilette/The Cleaning (Charras Robial and Montellier 1983) or Narratology (Drucker 1994) in fact belong to a separate but cohesive body of works. Though individual works of this newly defined (by me) group of image and word-narratives may share some characteristics with better-known models (such as those of comics or picture books for children) as a group they use far more extensively typographic manipulations and special layouts they experiment more freely with varying styles and they can redesign the object of the book itself.
Resisting Narrative Immersion
The following chapter will discuss Chris Ware's work in terms of narrative immersion which refers to the mental state of being absorbed in a storyworld and the capacity for being ‘carried away’ in the game of ‘make-believe’. Using Marie-Laure Ryan's taxonomy as a framework this chapter will examine three main types of narrative immersion: spatial temporal and emotional. Rather than focusing on Ware's embrace of immersion this chapter will take a negative approach addressing his deliberate resistance towards fictional immersion. It should be noted that this resistance should not be interpreted as a complete rejection but rather a deliberate delay.
The Cognitive Grammar of ‘I’: Viewing Arrangements in Graphic Autobiographies
Gerard Genette's classic questions about narrative perspective – ‘Who sees?’ and ‘Who speaks?’ – are at their most relevant when it comes to the multimodal narrative intricacies of autobiographical graphic novels. The already complex matter of narration and focalization in a purely visual medium is distinctly complicated when taking the different perspectives of the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ into account. Furthermore many acclaimed autobiographical comics including works like Maus Fun Home Blankets or Safe Area Goražde thematize the construction of their viewpoints addressing issues of memory objectivity and (un-) reliability. In this chapter I propose a new approach to this complexity turning to cognitive linguistics – more specifically to the model of cognitive grammar established by Ronald Langacker and his concept of ‘viewing arrangements’. In Langacker's theory all categories of grammar are based on cognitive conceptualizations that represent our position in the world and our relation to our surroundings. These conceptualizations have a distinctly visual bent. In Langacker's terminology a ‘viewing arrangement’ is a model of how a viewer conceptualizes a scene ‘the overall relationship between the “viewers” and the situation being “viewed”’. These arrangements change constantly as conceptualizers focus on various parts of their environment imbuing them with different meanings and expressing various degrees of subjectivity. Applying Langacker's model to examples from autobiographic graphic novels I will use the concept of the ‘viewing arrangement’ to illustrate how intricate narrative perspectives in these works can be analysed systematically and how different degrees of subjectivity are constructed with the formal means of comics. The model may not only help to untangle the narrative intricacies of autobiographies but may enrich discussions of narration and focalization in comics generally.
Multimodal Comics
Comics have always embraced a diversity of formats existing in complex relationships to other media and been dynamic in their response to new technologies and means of distribution. This collection explores interactions between comics other media and technologies employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives.
By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality adaptation intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital analogue music prose linguistics graphics) it expands and develops existing comics theory and also addresses multiple other media and disciplines.
Over the last decade Studies in Comics has been at the forefront of international research in comics. This volume showcases some of the best research to appear in the journal. In so doing it demonstrates the evolution of Comics Studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving artistic and production environment. The theme of multimodality is particularly apt since media and technologies have changed significantly during this period. The collection will thus give a view of the ways in which comics scholars have engaged with multimodality during a time when “modes” were continually changing.
Meaning from Movement: Blurring the Temporal Border between Animation and Comics
This chapter is informed by my current research in the communicative potential of animated elements within digital comics. Drawing on the writings of Thierry Groensteen and Barbara Postema I adopt the viewpoint that comics are a complex system in which individual signs and multiple codes combine and interact to communicate meaning. From this foundation I propose that animated movement can add additional layers of signification contributing connotative meaning to mostly denotational images. Within the chapter I recognize that attempts to incorporate animated elements into digital comics have often inadvertently illustrated the difficult relationship and potential incompatibility between cinematic animation and the specific conventions of comics. This discord can be attributed to competing temporal qualities; cinematic animation is a linear time-based art form while time in comics is illusory and implied largely through space. Eschewing a cinematic approach to animation my research builds on an observation by Daniel Goodbrey (2013) that animated elements are most successfully employed within panels as short animated loops. Unlike linear animated sequences the indefinite timing of loops does not challenge comics’ temporal code. As exemplars of this more harmonious application of animation to the comic form Jen Lee's ThunderPaw: In the Ashes of Fire Mountain (2012–16) is discussed alongside my current studio work Tepid Waters (Gowdy 2017) a digital comic in which the use of illusionistic movement is secondary to animated elements that communicate on symbolic or connotative levels.
Re-inventing the Origins of the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up: Régis Loisel's Peter Pan
Régis Loisel's Peter Pan (Vents d’Ouest 1990–2004) is a striking re-formulation of the origins of this mythical character due to its stylistic narrative and thematic darkness. This chapter uses Loisel's bande dessinée to examine the potential of comics as an adaptive medium and the reading process of the comic prequel two aspects which are productively linked by the concept of the network. I draw on Sanders’ and Groensteen's uses of the concept in adaptation studies and comics studies respectively to reflect on both the way that Loisel's bande dessinée is connected to the network of proliferating Peter Pan narratives and the way in which the comic functions as a network itself engaging the reader in a translinear and plurivectoral reading. This chapter first explores how core elements of the well-known Peter Pan narrative are adapted in Loisel's comic both echoing and contrasting with previous versions as Loisel's bande dessinée engages with and re-formulates the character's textual and visual multiplicities from the network of Peter Pan narratives. This chapter then draws on Paul Sutton's theorization of the ‘dual temporality’ of the prequel to reflect on the reading process of Loisel's Peter Pan as a comic prequel that productively uses the nature of a comic as a network and its potential for translinear and plurivectoral reading. Loisel's Peter Pan engages the reader in an active retrospective prospective and anticipatory reading process in a dynamic of repetition and difference.
‘Animating’ the Narrative in Abstract Comics
How can one read an abstract graphic narrative? Under what conditions do we cease to view a set of images as static representations or as marks on paper existing for their own sake and begin to read them as the story of a changing world in motion or even invest them with impetus emotions and desires? In this chapter I will explore the ways in which readers can make sense of abstract comics. The notion of an abstract graphic narrative seems to be a contradiction in terms: how can something be non-representational and also be a narrative a category which seems to presuppose representations of characters settings and events? When confronted with these visual texts readers will have to seek out and create such ‘actants’ and ‘existents’ from the material abstract comics offer if the text is to warrant its status as narrative. The chapter will use a number of exemplar stories from Andrei Molotiu's 2009 collection Abstract Comics to explore the process of reading these image texts. It will use ideas from narratology and philosophy of consciousness to help outline some of the ways we can ‘animate’ the static images we see across the sequence of panels in which we recognize and reconstitute persistent entities bringing a narrative life to the apparently inert marks on the comics page. I will explore the limits of readers’ ability to apply this process and comment on its relevance to more mainstream graphic narrative in general.