thinking

Some reading of late has been Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It's an interesting book for many reasons, one of which is that it's basically a defense of comics as a legitimate art form. It's clear that people are starting to take the medium seriously as Chris Ware is serialized in the Times now, Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer (albeit a while ago). It's right up there with humorous first-person essay and genre fiction for things that are either trendy or gaining legitimacy (only time will tell?). His definiton of art intrigues me: what what does that isn't directly related to survival or procreation. To wit, what cavemen did to fill the day when they weren't hunting/gathering/fucking. Add evolution, result is art. Don't know if I agree. Can you call the guy who picks up a guitar to get chicks an artist? What if he makes a great record? What about people who make their living making art? Where does craft fit in? Slippery indeed.

He's also got some stuff about abstracting faces from photorealistic to iconographic and how that shifts the reader's mentality from subjectivity to objectivity. Plus what abstraction of image does, plus where text fits into this pyramid schematic he's drawn.

Moreover, he's developed the stages to complete a comic book, and it's ridiculously easy to generalize them to any other artform. He's developed it so succinctly that it's easy to see where the avant-garde fits in, where the traditionalist fits in, among other entry points into art.

So yeah, really good stuff. I could say lots more.

So Tuesday I'm doing a reading of my very good friend Geraldine's play Iceland. She's really onto something with her playwrighting. Would that I could say I'm onto something these days.