Re: Re: Re: DATA DIARIES by CORY ARCANGEL on

t.,

you're missing McCloud's argument and the point of the book. "understanding comics" isn't an art history chronicle. it's a series of ruminations on the language of a particular medium. he's not suggesting that 20th century comic artists were directly influenced by egyptian art. he's suggesting that there's something intrinsic to the human condition that makes us want to tell stories sequentially with pictures, and he's analyzing the ways we have done so throughout history in order to arrive at some fundamental conclusions about images, icons, words, and communication itself.

He brings up the Egyptians to point out that this form of iconic storytelling is not so tangential to human culture as we might suppose. He later uses these Egyptian narratives to exemplify a time when images and words were not so segregated and specialized as they were at the end of the 19th century.

Likewise, with the 6 creative phases, he's not talking about historical art movements, he's talking about the intrinsic human creative process. Maybe there's no such thing as an intrinsic human creative process, and maybe art means nothing outside of its given socio-historical contexts – but those assertions were still open to some debate last time I checked.

peace,
curt


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t. wrote:

yo curt,

it's irrelevant in that those who pioneered newspaper comics in
america in the early part of the 20th weren't taking any cues from Egyptian art; they weren't thinking about Egyptian art. they were
being directly influenced by political cartoons from 1800s in both America and Europe (Nash, Daumier, etc) (btw Marcel Duchamp's bro was
a cartoonist for newspapers, it was considered very uncool so he changed his name to Jacques Villon ).

to say simply that it's a sequential pictorial narrative therefor
draw some relation is absurd. film (which fits the def as well) is
also directly related to Egyptian art? Early comics creators weren't directly influenced by any art historical form of sequential art. the only connection is a general art historical connection but then you
can say everyone from Titian to Matt Barney have connections to Egyptian art.

it's just a rather obvious play to attempt to give contemporary
comics some sort of art historical or cultural cache that they don't need. they live and breathe on their own. so perhaps it isn't an
absurd idea, simply an irrelevant observation.