Don't Get Too Emotional

So, after our rousing discussion a few classes ago regarding Mauss II, I've been thinking a lot of late about critique of comics. In general, I find critique of artwork very difficult to parse, because it often blends aesthetic preference and technical examination, without making a whole of disticntion between the two. I must admit I find this troubling, particularly when someone tries to pass the one off as the other. I am pretty accustomed to handling critique of prose, but critique of comics strikes me as much more complicated because not only to you have to deal with text, you also have to deal with visual art, and make sense of the relaionship between the two media.

Since we're on about Lynda Barry these days, I did some research on the web to try and figure out what people have to say her and what it can tell me about comic critique in general. One article I found, published in Melus in 2004 by Linda L. de Jesus, is called "Liminality and Mestiza Conciousness in Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons". Whoa. Ok. de Jesus offers a pretty good, pretty insightful reading of the book (although she leaves the punctuation out of the title which is a bummer). She certainly addresses both the textual and the visual elements of the narrative. I would call her examination balanced, but admiring of Barry's work. At one point she says:

Her deliberately "naive" graphic style complements the brutally honest musings of its young narrator and the often harsh subjects of the strips themselves.

de Jesus is taking a personal aesthetic reaction (to Barry's oft-discussed drawing style) and peer at it through the cannonical lens of theme.

On the other hand we have Ken Chen's Wilson-Center published annotated bibliography of comics, which says that

The tale, which is not dissimilar from a ­heavy-­handed New Yorker short story, caters to the taste of readers who wouldn’t otherwise like comics. While great comic artists, like great painters and filmmakers, enrich their medium with a paradigmatic visual style, Bechdel’s stiff illustrations merely reiterate the text. It’s a comic book with closed-captioning.

Ouch. But again, Chen's critique mixes personal reaction-based aesthetic judgments (her illustrations are "stiff") with more cannon-based comparison and examination (while great comic artists...) It's so interesting that neither of these people, as "scholars" are allowed to come out and totally cop to the huge emotional/aesetic component to their reaction to their respective fodder. I think for me, this is the problem that I have with art critique-- that people make observations in which they temper personal opinion with a dash of critical/cannonical knowledge and then think they can make absolute statements.

In this sense, I much prefer people who are open with the emotional component of a critique. I think it makes for more fodder (as opposed to emptying the discussion of relevance, as many people seem to fear. I think it also allows us to examine of of the most fascinating aspects of reading-- the way that the text interplays with our own personal set of aesthetics, associations and perceptive styles. It acknowledge passion as a critical tool, not a handicap.

One more great quote from a Barry fansite, another end of the "critical" spectrum".

her comics are in a lot of the free weekly papers of major cities, and a lot of ppl say they are "too busy" and "weird" or "ugly", but THEY ARE WRONG! lynda barry is the total god of you!! (www.blairmag.com)