In “The Vocabulary of Comics,” McCloud categorizes icons into three groups to begin to explain cartoon effectiveness: symbols, or “the images we use to represent concepts, ideas, and philosophies”; practical icons of language, science, and communication; and pictures meant to resemble their subjects (27). There is universality, he explains, in the exaggerated comic face – it is a picture that implores one to associate the icon with the real or the signified (31). According to McCloud, a viewer associates the comic face with his own face, but this assertion seems strained or presumptuous. However, McCloud’s assertion that cartoons are not an elimination of detail but rather are a specific focus on preferred details is an understanding that the viewer is associative and that realism nearly eliminates imaginative reception (30). Perhaps, even, realism can be understood as having little, if any, agency.
McCloud’s ideas seem useful in understanding the making of non-realistic or abstract art, as the abstract artist recalls memories and references subjects’ internal movement - that of the subject itself – and external movement – the effect of light or wind upon the subject – to understand the subject not representatively but sensually. Here, McCloud’s understanding of human interaction can help explain this idea:
When two people interact, they usually look directly at one another, seeing their partner’s features in vivid detail. Each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement…a sense of shape…a sense of general placement (35, 36).
One can understand abstract art, then, as a mind-picture, or the artist’s working away from the prototype or even the idea of the subject to realize his own reality of it. The color and size of a subject determine its overall impression within a space, the feeling it contributes to that space, and these sensual aspects are much more important to the abstract artist than those of basic visual detail. Generally, we each see objects in the same way, but we sense them differently.
I still cannot decide how to receive McCloud's argument that "By stripping down an image to its essential 'meaning,' an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't," (30). I like how you talk about the image having agency, because if an icon (or other simplified image)has more or less agency than a more realistic image then artists would certainly have to consider that when deciding how to illustrate an idea to an audience.
ReplyDeleteI think that McCloud's argument is a little simplistic, in that he seems to give the most agency to the author of the comic. I think that the introduction of images to a narrative may create a more complex exchange of agency between author and audience because it allows more avenues for authors to place meaning (images) but it also allows readers a physical space to imagine while reading. On the one hand I think this certainly gives the author more agency, because it allows them to 'lead' the reader to envision characters and setting in a certain way, but it also gives the audience agency, too. The more I am able to see into the mind of the author (and I would argue the introduction of images accomplishes this) the more I can have to base my reception of the narrative on.
Christina,
ReplyDeleteI would argue to say that if you believe he was providing assistance for understanding abstractions (in art), then he would have equally heightened your understanding of words, and especially literary works, ones you don't quite understand. McCloud explains what icons mean, "any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea" (27). Then he also goes on to state that, "words are totally abstract icons. That is, they bear no resemblance at all to the real McCoy" (28). I wonder what happens when people might take what McCloud states and applies it to literature of any sort.