Violent Lens: Social Memory as Documentation in Performance Art (A Comics Based Analysis)
Datum
2023-05
Autor:innen
Mayne, Annika
Zeitschriftentitel
ISSN der Zeitschrift
Bandtitel
Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
Despite their obvious visual differences, photography and comics both work to represent a snapshot of a moment, a reality — documentative or imagined. Three notable contemporary performances from the United States: Chris Burden’s Shoot, Joe Deutch’s untitled Gun Piece, and Cassils Becoming an Image reached their notoriety after the original, live performance. Photographs, news articles, and word of mouth acted as a funnel, allowing for the expansive consumption of works initially only viewable to a select audience. In the progression from liveness to memory, these performances were filtered through the documentary efforts used to capture the pieces in real time. Photographs and other documentative efforts become replacements for the real: an honest, objective snapshot of a past moment. Like photography, genres of the comic form such as memoir and journalism work to document memory and real events through illustration. Instead of a chemical process to reveal the light and shadows in a given moment—creating the illusion of objectivity in photography—comics carries the mark of its maker. By donning its representation of reality—coded through style, composition, and form—as the author’s truth, not the objective truth, comics bears its biases as a key part of its visual communication. By investigating Shoot, Gun Piece, and Becoming an Image—all pieces reliant on documentation to reach their audience—through the comics form, this thesis aims to reveal the imagined seamlessness that tenuously holds liveness, documentation, and memory together as one.
Beschreibung
57 pages
Schlagwörter
academic comic, comics, performance, queer, meditation, art