I came across this book while doing research in the library. I was looking at the idea of narrative abstractions. That is the narrative arc of a story (beginning middle end) being present in abstractions. and i kept getting conflating the idea that narrative and story were the same thing, or that narrative had to imply that there was representational imagery.
But then i remembered that Stan Brakhage has narrative in his pieces. and so then i began to wonder how that would translate over into images, seeing as its easier to compose narrative with constant movement rather than still images. and so i was like what has narrative and images… COMICS!!
Low and behold theres an abstract comics: the anthology book. This book looks and tries to answer the question of how comics can be abstract.
This book gathered together a list of comic artists who have been toying with the idea of comics that told “stories” but whose panels have little to no representational imagery. Basically what they did was reduce comics to the most basic of their elements - Panel Grid, Brushstrokes, colors. and what this did was highlight the underlying formal mechanism that all comics have (leading the eyes from page to page, sequence of page layouts etc.)
Reading through this book and looking at all these images helped me to move forward with my research.
It’s clear to me now that abstraction and narrative can coexist together because Narrative doesn’t imply representational identifiable realities or objects, its about the passage of time and change over time, i.e for something to have narrative it has to change over time.
It’s getting me thinking about:
- What is character?
- What is a story?
There has to be a flow involved (Beginning, middle, end) (conflict, action, resolution)
But so I’m thinking about these things that I’m creating as if they were alive i.e. they’ve got their own history, they have a story to them (SONDER)
Representation - has history, it has identifiable language, there’s semiotics involved.
Then i thought, can abstractions (in the sense of complete non representational imagery, no identifiable traits in reality) have semiotics? have representation?
I think in a sense, yes they can. If you strip photography of representation, thats a very political and pointed action. There’s a very definitive reasoning behind that. When you strip photography of representation you’re left with thinking about surface, material, physicality, form, PROCESS. etc.
(this is as far as I’ve gotten to thinking about this because i haven’t really developed a language for talking about it.)
No photo politics if you will. (why i make what i make vs why i don’t make what i make.)
But i think its important to develop a language if you’re working in abstraction. what i mean by that is that lets say for example you take a picture of a coffee cup, that already has a history, its easy to talk about because it already has an identifiable language behind it (a history)
But with abstraction you have to develop your own language to talk about what this is, and why it matters.
PROCESS i think might be a good place to start because that implies narrative (steps to take to achieve an action or a result) Process has a history, materials have a history behind them.
I think one thing moving forward is i have to look and see:
- What’s consistent in my work?
- What’s changing?
- What keeps me going?
Also i think I might be taking abstraction to literally. So i think i have to be more abstract in thinking about abstraction which means possibly being a little more literal when it comes to creating abstractions. I dunno something to think about i suppose.
But yeah this abstract comics book, check it out if you get the chance its really neat!
heres a link to the book:
So yeah abstraction can have reference, narrative, etc. even though they’re a departure from reality. Thats kind of awesome!
…. afterthought: i mean there are varying degrees of abstraction. if you’re talking about formal compositions from figurative sources, that implies reference of an object in reality. and then theres the complete departure from reality, non representational abstractions that have no derivation from reality based objects.
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