Kia Presley: Visual Response to Class
Each of the three links to Visual Portfolios listed for this Unit requires permission from the creator, and Kia Presley graciously granted my access to her page. As I understand, each student was asked to find and comment upon three images that related to the presentations and discussions on Class for one of Dr. Jenkin's assignments. Ms. Presley chose four images, three cartoons and one black and white photograph. See for yourself:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5282/5236684729_0e1f7538d2.jpg
https://coto2.wordpress.com/tag/income-gap/
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/22-0
http://edu.glogster.com/glog.php?glog_id=18158230&scale=54&isprofile=true
Ms. Presley's responses are primarily geared to class assignments and readings of which I am unfamiliar, but she speaks movingly to the chasm between what we're taught and the grim, opposing reality touched upon in the initial cartoon. Students in the United States, regardless of their socio-economic Class, are taught the education is the way to escape poverty and oppression. However, especially in today's economy, mounting student loan debt and the elevated unemployment statistics show us advancing education can become oppressive and perpetuate poverty. I am struck by the fact that three of these images are political cartoons, a genre that is becoming a major player in the protest arts thanks to the comic advancements: graphic novels, autographics, and social media.
Art Speigelman, author and illustrator of the MAUS books, and the post-9/11 book In the Shadow of No Towers, has been writing and lecturing on the power of comics for most of his career. When asked in an interview for The Comics Journal why he created a Graphic Memoir about the Holocaust and his family's history, Spiegelman explained that form is a teaching tool, and further replied:
SPIEGELMAN: It's true that the "drawing comics" part is just a given for me, even though people came up and said, "Why did you do it in a comic book?" "Well, how else?"
It's in my grammar; it's in my language. And yet, I think that [Maus's] subject matter overwhelms the formal aspects as it reasonably should or would, and therefore, it's a bunch of loose figures that somehow get this story told instead of setting it in type. [Comics] informs, for better or for worse, all of my work. Even this book — OK, it ain't comics, but it is words and pictures and graphic. When you say it's useful as a [teaching] tool about the Holocaust, it's probably also useful in how to deal with what's urgent in your own life by trying to assimilate it and make it into something. So, again, the Holocaust subject matter overwhelms everything, as it reasonably would.
http://www.tcj.com/an-art-spiegelman-interview/
So as we've discussed throughout this term, genre is a political choice to some extent, but each of our arts of protest have to stem naturally from our own hearts and souls.
(Elizabeth A.)
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