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Art and Politics are often at odds
Aug. 26th, 2003 11:24 amGave Cat-Tharsis a links page finally.
After looking at Comixpedia and wondering "who is this Scott McCloud guy everyone keeps talking about?," I picked up his book Reinventing Comics. It seems somehow inevitable that the Graphic Novel would open the door to Graphic Lit-Crit and the first part of the book is a truly impressive example thereof. His theories of literature, art, and economics make a world of sense, and his definition of art articulates very well, without intending to, the reasons that artists are so often out of place in the academy.
Because Artists step outside the stream of life in order to observe and portray it, they are outside of the political continuum that comprises the framework from within which their work is judged. The Ironic consequence of this is that cartoonists who identify themselves with one side or the other of the political spectrum may produce works that are more ambiguous, pehaps, than their original intent. One good example of this comes from the decidedly right-wing Glenn McCoy, who drew an image of George W. Bush sitting in a tank labeled "UN" with a flaccid gun barrel emerging from the turret. Given that the Turret was about waist high on Dubya, the image suggested to this liberal reader Dubya's real motive for going to war was his own flaccidity. Although McCoy was trying to comment on U.N. impotence, the image he created suggested that our own Commander and Chief was flaccid. On the other side of the political spectrum, left-leaning D.C. Simpson's "Election Day Message" Ozy and Millie Strip would be every bit at home gracing the pages of "The National Review" as it would in "The Nation".
The point is not to suggest that either of these artists has failed in their vision, but to point out, rather, that art is so independent of the political framework, that it can even transcend the intentions of the creator. For this reason, critical discussions of "authorial intent" become meaningless as the art takes on a life of its own, as characters begin to behave in ways their creators never imagined when those characters were designed, and as expression is given to observations that even the artist is unaware he has made. It is for this reason that the Ancient Greeks believed that bards to be channeling a Muse rather than creating a work governed by their own thought.
After looking at Comixpedia and wondering "who is this Scott McCloud guy everyone keeps talking about?," I picked up his book Reinventing Comics. It seems somehow inevitable that the Graphic Novel would open the door to Graphic Lit-Crit and the first part of the book is a truly impressive example thereof. His theories of literature, art, and economics make a world of sense, and his definition of art articulates very well, without intending to, the reasons that artists are so often out of place in the academy.
Because Artists step outside the stream of life in order to observe and portray it, they are outside of the political continuum that comprises the framework from within which their work is judged. The Ironic consequence of this is that cartoonists who identify themselves with one side or the other of the political spectrum may produce works that are more ambiguous, pehaps, than their original intent. One good example of this comes from the decidedly right-wing Glenn McCoy, who drew an image of George W. Bush sitting in a tank labeled "UN" with a flaccid gun barrel emerging from the turret. Given that the Turret was about waist high on Dubya, the image suggested to this liberal reader Dubya's real motive for going to war was his own flaccidity. Although McCoy was trying to comment on U.N. impotence, the image he created suggested that our own Commander and Chief was flaccid. On the other side of the political spectrum, left-leaning D.C. Simpson's "Election Day Message" Ozy and Millie Strip would be every bit at home gracing the pages of "The National Review" as it would in "The Nation".
The point is not to suggest that either of these artists has failed in their vision, but to point out, rather, that art is so independent of the political framework, that it can even transcend the intentions of the creator. For this reason, critical discussions of "authorial intent" become meaningless as the art takes on a life of its own, as characters begin to behave in ways their creators never imagined when those characters were designed, and as expression is given to observations that even the artist is unaware he has made. It is for this reason that the Ancient Greeks believed that bards to be channeling a Muse rather than creating a work governed by their own thought.
