Artistic Approach Research Articles

Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art

Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

A Multidimensional Artistic Approach to Enhance Understanding of Julia Sets through Computer Programming

This article proposes an artistic approach to increase and enrich the understanding of Julia Sets. This approach includes the mathematical, the playful, the artistic and the computational dimensions. It is argued that these four dimensions are not disjointed or dissociated despite general rejection by traditional academic communities and art critics communities. Also, some significant collections of Computational Art or Computer-Generated Mathematical Art are mentioned. Four artistic creations based on Julia Sets are presented as examples using the CFDG language. Finally, an informal application of the approach was carried out and artistic production of students are presented and discussed.

Importance of Tacit Knowledge in Geoscience Brought to the Surface through Artistic Methods

This study of scientists’ reactions to the experience of an art exhibition, researches Polyani’s (2009) tacit knowing, a knowledge that we cannot easily express into words, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) striated and smooth spaces, with striated being a channelled and restricted way of thinking compared to smooth as free flowing and creative. To research these concepts, a psycho-social method—the Visual Matrix (VM)—is used as a research method. Two groups of geoscientists were brought together to first view Waterways, an art exhibition, and then participate in a VM. The research concludes that the scientists were able to express tacit knowledge elicited through the experience of Waterways, enabling them to think differently about their work and form new understandings about the natural environment in relationship to themselves and society. For artists, the VM can be an effective tool when working with scientists and the public. The study argues the importance of bringing tacit knowledge to the surface, allowing greater possibility of combining scientific and artistic approaches.

SAVING “JOGED MATARAM” VIA YOUTUBE: PRESERVATION AND DISSEMINATION OF LOCAL CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

This research examines the paradigm shift of cultural policy within the Yogyakarta Royal Palace in embracing technology by means of social media to make the palace performance called “Joged Mataram” known to public. The data used in this qualitative research include various YouTube uploads of the screen-dance. Ethnographic method and detailed analysis of the uploads were put to use in this study. The results prove that the Yogyakarta Royal Palace had anticipated the digital age development by involving cultural citizens through the use of social media. Dance documentation products can be seen as cultural strategy in participating inthe digital life. It is also proven that the artistic approach of the Yogyakarta Royal Palace requires netizens’ participation to opine as to whether the palace performances can still meet the demands of the changing times.

Comic-Strip Mining: Neo-Extractivism and Land Conflicts in Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Nelly Luna and Jesús Cossio’s La guerra por el agua (2016)

From the oil pipelines that scar the Northwest Territories transforming the lives of First Nation communities to the forest fires that rampage across the Gran Chaco due to soy deforestation, the devastating impact of neoextractivism is writ large in the Americas. To the backdrop of ecological devastation and the struggle for natural resources, local peoples across the region are faced with the impact of cultural upheaval and displacement brought about by faceless multinational corporations. In this article, I address the way two comics artists have used the graphic form to address neoextractivism, highlighting how investigative comics can create counterimaginaries of exploitation by relating image-stories told by local inhabitants. In 2016, working in collaboration with Nelly Luna Amancio and Ojo Público, the Peruvian Jesús Cossio published the webcomic La guerra por el agua, a study of the impact of the Tía María mine in Ayacucho, southern Peru, an operation owned by the Mexican company Southern Copper, later also released as a newspaper-sized pamphlet version in 2018. And in 2020 the US-Maltese Joe Sacco – who spoke at the launch of La guerra por el agua – released his graphic work Paying the Land, an exploration of the upheaval caused to the Dene in the Mackenzie River Valley by both the Canadian state and mining enterprises. Though both journalistic works are cut through by social protest and political wranglings, they simultaneously demonstrate the power of the micropolitical – in which we might include the comic form itself – to transgress the narratives and imaginaries of big capital.

Spatial Cities in the East and South. Gyula Kosice’s Artistic Dialogue with Hungarian and Slovak Artists

The article aims to reveal similarities between the artistic approaches of the Czechoslovakian-born Argentine artist Gyula Kosice and the Slovak art scene. Referencing Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of “horizontal art history”, the article focuses on the artistic dialogue between kinetic and op art artists developed during the Cold War period in the countries of Central Europe and Latin America. The goal of the article is twofold. Firstly, it will expose the specificity of artistic practices and strategies developed in non-Western art scenes. It also aims to reveal certain proximities among artists, especially those engaged in kinetic and geometrical art. Adopting a transnational and transmodern approach, the text will focus on Gyula Kosice’s contact with the Slovak artist Alex Mlynárčik, established through the French art critic Michel Ragon. It will also highlight similarities between Kosice’s hydrospatial cities, Mlynárčik’s architectural proposals realised with the VAL group in the 1970s, and the concept of prospective architecture coined by Michel Ragon.

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Comedy and Jewishness in the Work of Stephen Dwoskin

ABSTRACT: This essay reframes the infamously grave and grueling experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin as a comic artist. Experimental film in the UK is usually discussed in terms of the marginal history of artists' film and video, or the form's relationship to elite contemporary art. Stephen Dwoskin was engaged with these concerns. He was, however, also a devotee of Hollywood film, like his fellow filmmakers in the New York underground, and like the group of "film enthusiasts" that founded the London Film-Makers' Co-op on its model and screened popular and generic American cinema alongside avant-garde and arthouse works. This essay will argue that comedy in particular, a genre enriched by Jewish artists between his birth in 1939 and his leaving for Europe in 1964, was a major shaping intertext on Dwoskin's work. It will further argue that an engagement with comedy and its practitioners allowed Dwoskin to explore Jewish-related themes in a subterranean manner when Jewish identity was not a usual subject in experimental film—unlike the directly queer, black, or post-colonial films made by his contemporaries. After a survey of two major Jewish thinkers on comedy—Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud—the major intertext discussed in the essay will be the early work of the Marx Brothers. In the first films where he played a version of himself, Dwoskin appropriated themes, images, and even narrative approaches introduced by American Jewish comics like the Marx Brothers, such as the foregrounding of the precarious, unstable, or disruptive body; the comedy of sexual dysfunction and bodily failure; and identity crisis resulting from social marginality. With Dwoskin, as with these comics, such themes and structures resulted in the subversion of mainstream narrative modes and character stereotypes.

Introduction

This special issue of European Comic Art presents articles on the diversity of contemporary feminist comics in the Nordic region. The Nordic countries have seen an explosion in feminist comics and graphic novels since the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Sweden, feminist comics have become commercial successes, winning prestigious prizes, and appearing in exhibitions, Instagram, and other social media. Recently, a new generation of artists has entered the scene with a renewed focus on queer and intersectional issues. This special issue directs attention to feminist comic art throughout the Nordic region—with representation from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—by established creators as well as emerging voices. The history of feminist comics can be traced back to the social movements of the 1970s, but the energy and creativity of contemporary feminist comics is new, reflecting both international trends and conditions specific to the region and to each national context.

“Amantes del Barrio Franklin”: Reading Chilean Shakespeare Through Cultural Anthropophagy

Cultural Anthropophagy, an artistic approach that originated in Brazil, takes cannibalism as a metaphor for consuming what is useful from the colonizer’s culture and using it to make new, self-affirming art. Because of its emphasis on the artist’s autonomy, Cultural Anthropophagy provides a useful framework for reading Latin American Shakespeare productions without casting the practitioners as the subaltern. Cultural Anthropophagy makes space to see the cultural and political impact of Latin American Shakespeare performance when practitioners engage anthropophagically with Shakespeare. This article analyzes a 1987 street performance of Romeo y Julieta by Chilean theater troupe La Compañía Escuela Teatro “Q” in Santiago, Chile. I argue that Teatro “Q’s” production—which used Pablo Neruda’s 1964 translation of Romeo and Juliet—is an example of a dual-level process of Cultural Anthropophagy. Neruda’s translation was itself anthropophagic and enabled Teatro “Q” to produce an adaptation of Romeo y Julieta that viewers recognized as distinctively Chilean, and which drew on community participation to enact a process of empowerment at a time when a repressive regime offered few outlets for the popular voice. Reading Latin American Shakespeare performance through Cultural Anthropophagy centers the process and outcomes of practitioners’ work while destabilizing the dominance of Shakespeare.

Introduction: Poetic Practice and the Public

From the 1990s to today, poetic practices in France engage with the forms and languages of public life. These works focus on representations and discourses circulating within the public sphere. Poetic practices turn to public problems, issues that seem to surpass available theoretical tools and demand new conceptual and artistic approaches. In an age of "médiarchie" (Yves Citton), the question of poetic practices and the public raises several lines of inquiry: How does poetry generate new performative modes and forms, and how do poets situate themselves before their public? What are the political stakes of poetry's turn toward the public sphere?

Processual Aesthetics and Feminist Trouble

Within the landscape of current feminist comics production in the Nordic region, Rikke Villadsen is a comics artist notable for works that challenge gendered sexual norms through genre play and visual pastiche. This article explores how Villadsen’s style of comics-making draws on processual aesthetics, a term offered and explored in conversation with Villadsen’s comics and queer theory. Villadsen’s work brings central tenets of second-wave feminist thought into the contemporary context of feminist body politics, resulting in tensions on and beyond the pages of her comics. The article discusses the ways Villadsen’s comics enact feminist trouble through representations of transgressive sexuality, gender roles, and the materiality of the comics as physical objects.

The Power of the Periphery: Circulation of Cross-Cultured Languaging Through the Importation of Francophone Comics in the Nation-State of Sweden, 1900–2020

Abstract The objective with this study is to shed light upon how international exchanges on the comic art market contribute to democratization processes and renegotiation of hegemonies in the literary field worldwide. The focus is on how the variation in imported comics from a central language, in this case French, to the peripheral space of Sweden, can be observed during the time-period 1900–2020, as well as on which diversity importation of comics has been allowed over time. Theoretically anchored in sociological perspectives in literary studies highly influenced by Casanova’s ([1999]2004) seminal work, this contribution challenges established approaches in the field that depart from central cultural spaces in the world. Instead, this analysis highlights how the periphery gains agency on the international market and challenges relations of domination through translation practices. One hypothesis put forward consists of the idea that Francophone author-illustrators from the global South would be identifiable in the data in 1990’s, as is the case in the literary field. However, in the comics field this change emerges later, and does not appear distinctively until 2005. The change is paired with a promotion of Francophone female author-illustrators in Swedish translations, equally from the global South and the global North. The results also highlight that Sweden positions the Francophone space as hyper-central within the comics field. The specific practices adopted in the importation point to how a periphery creates agency to define a medium and a genre locally and play a role in international cultural exchanges.

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

Music, dance and painting to treat eating disorders; The Chinese TIBET-Model

Eating disorders are considered an increasing public health problem, also in China. They comprise a broad spectrum of medical conditions such as anorexia nervosa, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, bulimia and binge eating, which often go hand in hand with considerable mental and physiological issues such as obesity and metabolic syndrome. Scientific research and clinical experience suggest distinct therapeutic interventions; many of them are related to cognitive behavioural therapy and psychoeducation. The present article introduces artistic approaches comprising music, dance and painting, the so called TIBET-Model, which is based on five principles, namely trance, identity, beauty, exploration and transition, hence the term. This model can be applied as add-on therapy, complementary therapy or main therapeutic intervention, depending on the patient’s attitude toward creative and aesthetic processes, as well as therapeutic responses.

Sonification of weather data as a non-human-centric artistic approach

Background - In the mid-20th century, the emergence of sound studies demonstrated a shift of research interest in sonic practitioners. This field gains its prevalence by expanding the boundaries of prevailing conception through proposing alternative creative approaches in sound art practices. Methods – Two methods were presented – listening and sounding to promote creative sound making. The first method, listening involves soundwalking and recording sound from the external environments. These recordings were then re-evaluated and post-processed in audio editing software. The second method, sounding involves the creation of a weather data sonification system in Pure Data environment, in which the perceptual experience from the first method was taken into consideration. Result – First method enables the genesis of creative idiosyncrasies, such as preferences and ideas through the sonic perception of environmental events. In this process, noise and weather were identified as environmental components that share similar sensible qualities. Thus, noise is a prevalent medium that inspires the creation of sound generators in the sonification system presented in this paper. The sonic output of data sonification reveals an analogical connection between weather data and sonic parameters, in which changes in data values result in changes in acoustic properties. These outputs deliver different sensibilities based on their data parameters; sonification of temperature data might suggest an alarming effect to the listener. Conclusion – The proposed methods were intricately linked, suggesting environmental events to be perceived and realized through a non-scientific perspective. By highlighting aesthetic possibilities of environmental components, this paper presents an alternative perspective in contrast with the human-centric worldview through the creation of sonic works.

The Study on the Relationship Between the Comic Artists' Styles and the Visual Languages: From the Stylistic Changes in the Work of Japanese Comic Artists

The Study on the Relationship Between the Comic Artists' Styles and the Visual Languages: From the Stylistic Changes in the Work of Japanese Comic Artists

From a story point of view: an interview with Rian Hughes

ABSTRACT Rian Hughes is a graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist, writer and type designer who has worked extensively for the British and American advertising, music and comic book industries. He has written and drawn comics for 2000AD and Batman: Black and White, and designed logos for The Avengers, The X-Men, Superman, record label Hedkandi, MTV and James Bond. He has edited books on mid-century lifestyle illustration and custom typography, and written on semiotics, culture and collecting vintage science fiction pulps and paperbacks. Recently, Hughes has published two experimental novels that both involve typographical experiment, illustration and complex storytelling. XX. A Novel Graphic (2020) and The Black Locomotive (2021) prompted me to contact the author and ask for an interview.

Multi-Histories:

In this paper, I examine select graphic novels that narrativise intersecting histories by artists who possess distinct social positionalities and subjectivities. The first is Luke W Molver’s two-part graphic novel about King Shaka, Shaka Rising: A Legend of the Warrior Prince (2017) and King Shaka: Zulu Legend (2019). This epic illustrates King Shaka’s rise to power and his unmatched conquering pursuits that helped form the Zulu Kingdom. The second case study is Zinhle (Zhi) Zulu’s – hereafter Zhi Zulu – part-historical, part-futuristic graphic novel The Spiritual Adventures of Nandipha: Protector of the Zulu Kingdom (2019), which visually narrates the story of Nandipha, a superhero whose identity is inspired by King Shaka’s mother, Nandipha, and the influential women in Zhi Zulu’s life. I am specifically interested in how the positionalities of these two comic artists – Molver, a white man, on the one hand and on the other, Zhi Zulu, a black woman – influence their artistic approach, narrative arc, content selection, stylistics and overall treatment of indigenous Zulu histories. Using the notion of pluri- or multi-histories, I argue that these distinct but convergent comic book explorations of the interlinked lives of King Shaka and Nandipha are poignant artistic exemplars of how indigenous histories should always be retold in the plural.

Perspectives of Kidney Transplant Recipients, Transplant Candidates, and Living Kidney Donors on the Role of Patients' Self-Narratives and Experiences of Creative Writing Workshops: A Qualitative Study.

Kidney transplantation is the best treatment for kidney failure but is associated with medical, psychological, and existential challenges for patients. Patients' experiential knowledge can help other patients facing these challenges. Patients' self-narratives and creative writings are ways to operationalize this experiential knowledge. Creative writing has been described as a therapeutic tool for patients with chronic disease. Over the past year, we conducted creative writing workshops with kidney transplant recipients (KTRs), living kidney donors (LKDs), kidney transplant candidates (KTCs), and professional writers. During these workshops, patients were invited to explore different aspects of their experiences of their transplant or donation journey through narrative-writing, poetry, comic art, and screenwriting. The objectives of this study were to gather the perspectives of KTRs, KTCs, and LKDs on the role of patients' self-narratives and creative writing, and to collect patients' experiences of the creative writing workshops. Focus groups and individual interviews. The Center hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) kidney transplant program. KTRs, LKDs, and KTCs attending the CHUM kidney transplant clinic between February 2020 and January 2021. We conducted 2 focus groups and 8 semi-structured individual interviews with 7 KTRs, 8 LKDs, and 5 KTCs from the CHUM between June and November 2020, before the creative writing workshops. We also conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with 5 KTRs, 1 KTC, and 4 LKDs in March 2021, after their participation in the creative writing workshops. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Thematic and content analyses were conducted. KTRs, LKDs, and KTCs had multiple significant moments to share from their transplant/donation journey. These moments were highly emotional and marked by uncertainty. The creative writing workshops were described as therapeutic by participants, because they offered a safe space for group-facilitated reflection, including a discovery and learning process, and normalization, relativization, and appreciation of the transplant/donation experience. The creative writing workshops also provided an opportunity to give back to others (helping other patients, promoting kidney donation and continuing this process in the future through the web platform). Our participants came from a single French-speaking urban transplant center in Quebec and were highly educated. The study set out to capture the perspectives of KTRs, LKDs, and KTCs through the sharing of self-narratives and their participation in creative writing workshops related to their transplant or donation journey. A website was set up to publish patients' creative writings (https://recitsdudonetdelavie.lorganon.ca/les-recits/). Further study is needed to assess the website's impact on other patients. Not registered.