WRITING
[written for ART 4115A / Professor Christina Martinez]
13 April 2022
Superheroes, animals, and other metaphors for understanding the world
Can the use of metaphor and metonymy in cartoons and comic books save the world? In the text “Heart is for love: cognitive salience and visual metonymies in comics”, Hubert Kowalewski demonstrates how metaphors and metonymies are not strictly a linguistic phenomena—but a mental phenomena expressed linguistically. In other words, Kowalewski explains that metaphors and metonymies are not just ways of speaking about the world, but ways of thinking about it (1). So, what do they do? Why exactly do metaphors and metonymies affect us in the way that they do? Kowalewki states that metonymies and metaphors are a demonstration of our natural inclination to think and talk about certain things that have the greatest “cognitive salience” to us. Plainly, this means that things that we consider valuable or the things that seem important in our minds are not random, and affect how we see the world. We can see this in the ways we talk about attractiveness, or strength; phrases like “she’s not just a pretty face”, or “he’s as dumb as an ox”. However, they are not always good vehicles—we can feel that the comparison between a person’s intelligence and that of an ox evokes an image of a big headed, huffing man with no sense of reason, who charges when he sees red. What’s more - both metaphors imply a certain dichotomy between beauty and intelligence that is baseless, but feels valid, because of how the cognitive salience is intertwined with a social value system that places beauty over intelligence. Additionally, where does this leave our understanding of oxes?
After even mentioning beauty standards, that may feel like an abrupt or silly question. But given the way in which cognitive salience influences us, we can see how these concepts can be translated across media and how our constant exposure to what Kowalewski calls “conventionalized strategies” is why we recognize them (and by extension, ourselves) in fantastical mediums like cartoons, superhero movies, or television in general. There’s a certain link to be found in how Clark Kent's image plays into the value system of beauty vs intelligence and collaborates to shroud the identity of Superman, too. Superman is super not only because he has other-worldly powers like flight or x-ray vision, but because he is literally a super-man—making him being both strong and beautiful seem logical to his otherworldliness, and vice versa. This explains too why he hides behind a thickly-framed pair of glasses, and why people accept his alter-ego as much as they don’t, because it satisfies this cognitive salience dynamic. It’s unclear if any medium will be unproblematic toward the message it purports to tell, but perhaps that is a matter of perspective. What makes movies or television unique is that the medium is entirely the message (2), so a lot of what makes “the magic of television” is the built-in comfort of knowing what happens to characters is not real. A lot of the entertainment found in the vacuum of a scary movie is because the story feels like it could happen in real life, and because you know that you can also exit this vacuum at any time. This certain distance is connected to what Roland Barthes said on the history of myths, and how they suspend reality while guided by a narrative plot, which allows “the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear if it were denotative” (3), despite its un-reality. In this way, we can see that when confusion drives the plot, the cinematic world easily seems false. But when a world of monsters behaves logically, we make peace with it as plausible. We praise the makeup artistry used in mythical plots, because elves are supposed to be ethereal and beautiful. But say the same actor decided they wanted cosmetic enhancement in the real world, they would be considered less real (4).
So why do we accept one thing over the other? Let’s circle back to the Clark Kent of it all, more specifically his thick-framed glasses. In comic book panels, there are both visual and linguistic signifiers that tell us the story and satisfy our cognitive salience. POP! CRASH! BANG!— and other onomatopoeias like these allow us to see the sound of a particularly high-energy panel. Cognitive salience appears straightforward with these devices, since they look close to how they behave. Kowaleski examines the salience proximity of certain imagery further by going through how when a comic needs to depict music, a musical note is more likely to be used over sheet music: “the choice of the note (rather than the spreadsheet) cannot be explained merely by the fact that there is a co-occurrence relation between notes and a melody, because a similar relation holds between a spreadsheet with score and melody.” Kowaleski continues, “even though both notes and scores co-occur with the melody, the note is more salient to the melody than the spreadsheet.” In essence, a music note is the clearest signifier that can be understood by the broadest range of viewers. From this we can deduce that the design choice of Clark Kent having glasses is the most salient indicator of intelligence, and by extension non-beautiful-super-hero-ness, especially in comparison to something like clumsiness. Glasses fulfill the need for Superman's alter-ego to be believable because although clumsiness is related to conceptual dorkiness—it is a bodily representation, which as Scott McLoud explains in Understanding Comics, better depicts emotional states; showing a behavior (caused by emotion) for emotion (5). This is also why Superman grimaces as though he is in physical pain when in the presence of kryptonite.
This brings up an underlying aspect that is important to acknowledge when assessing superheroes as a vehicle for how comic-based metaphors and metonymies influence viewers: that these characters are very often clearly human in appearance. Even with the phenomenon of animal-pseudonym superheroes, like Batman, spiderman, ant-man, et cetera—these characters are still human-first characters, which is why they wear masks and are otherwise so often outcasts burdened to be protectors of a society that equally values and chastises their existence for being different, or why most superheroes began as underdogs in one way or another. Where anthropomorphic animal characters take on human characteristics in their design or presence [figure 1] (6), these superheroes are essentially anti-anthropomorphic, and may be better understood as anthropocentric. But should they be? Do our creepy-crawler-supers suffer ongoing indifference as a metaphor to highlight how non-human beings and spaces are increasingly othered, mediated, or destroyed? A better question to ask might be—can animal characters ever be non-anthropomorphic? Here’s why: when it comes to the purpose of animals in cartoons or comics, they are either anthropomorphic or entirely background fixtures. When animals are background aspects, they are essentially flattened signs which cater to cognitive salience in a similar fashion to the music note. If a panel rectangle contained one straight horizontal line at its middle, and three v-shaped forms, each slightly smaller from the last, it would denote birds flying back in space, ultimately signifying a horizon [figure 3], which has nothing to do with the birds and everything to do with linear perspective. When animals are main characters and stories are told from the point of view of the animal, we can see that their expressions are both animal but also distinctly human [figure 2], which is also reflected in how much these stories engage with human metaphors than actual animal dynamics. The lion may be a ‘king of the jungle’ and there may be The Lion King (1994), but the concept of king-lineage within the movie is entirely human and caters to human interests.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
If we can for a moment suspend that the monsters in the animated movie Monsters Inc. (2001) are not technically animal characters, we can expand upon how The Lion King perpetuates the idea that kings are apart of nature, which tells children that our current system and its history of violence is natural, in addition to denying the reality that lions are actually very egalitarian animals (7). Monsters Inc. is a film that is more subtle, more sophisticated in showcasing certain human interests than one might realize. In fact, the seemingly silly main plot of the film—monsters making children scream, seems antithetical to my claim. But in fact, these are monsters clocking into work in order to steal children’s screams for energy, which is quite a stark representation of our then impending fuel crisis and now ever-nearing reality of leaving future generations with an irrecoverably damaged planet. The movie is centered on mining childrens screams as a fuel source. It might not be obvious when compared to another animated movie very explicitly about climate change, Wall-E (2008). Wall-E is a film about life after humans have left earth, where one small robot is left to tidy up the abandoned garbage planet. It won ten critically acclaimed awards, including the academy award for best animated feature. But looking back on the film and the world at the time, in 2007-2008 global warming became a heightened worldwide topic as leaked documents revealed the extent to which the Bush administration in the US had censored a G8 agreement on climate change (8). What Wall-E, Monsters Inc. and the Bush administration all have in common can be found in Mark Fisher’s 2008 text Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher states that films like Wall-E (and I would argue Fisher would vehemently include Monsters Inc. as well), “exemplify what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” (9)
It is not a far cry to assume that if the monster characters were animals the connection to energy sources and climate issues may have proven too obvious. The easy reaction would be to connect monsters as a metaphor for corporate greed, and yet the monsters were the workers. From this, Monsters Inc. employs a much older method in anthropomorphism and subverts it. Where caricature has used animals and anthropomorphism to depict political figures, groups, and power struggles in a satirical way that typically informs public opinion, the fact that Monsters Inc. includes a scrooge-type CEO monster character as the villain in the end feels like a total scapegoat. Although we may have fallen prey to believing this tells a story of a proletarian triumph, the fact that the plot of Monsters Inc. ends with the discovery that children's laughter is worth so much more than their screams could be seen as a metaphor for keeping the pubic entertained by current issues, and therefore not really paying attention enough to notice the solution just upholds the same system. Except mining happiness for profit, which sounds a lot like a metaphor for an algorithm now 21 years later. Looking to Slavoj Žižek and Pfaller to connect this to interpassivity further, they state that “the threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on” (10). In viewing metonymy, metaphor, and anthropomorphism in this broad overview of contemporary cartoons, comics, and animation, even if it appears obvious that we enjoy identifying with anthropomorphized characters, we should not exclude them from the possibility they signify something more in real life.
It is equally valid to wonder if we should simply understand comic book characters as we do television in general, which mostly only has a real time responsibility to entertain. In fact, a 2016 study showed that pre-school age children were found to be more likely to be altruistic and giving after reading a human story, but that reading an anthropomorphic story decreased this likelihood (11). Researchers concluded that “contrary to the common belief, realistic stories, not anthropomorphic ones, are better for promoting young children’s prosocial behaviour”. What this study does not specify is whether that altruism extends to non-human entities. Just like social media, animal or anthropomorphized characters cannot show us what life is actually like, it can only show us how life is being experienced by those using characters as a tool to examine it. In using cognitive salience as a framework, watching animal characters like Fern Gulley, Watership Down, or Bambi, or other animal characters who demonstrate environmental destruction by humans, it is clear a certain understanding in my generation was imparted. Perhaps the main hope is that visual media in these forms will be recognized as revelatory to our understanding and there will be more climate-centered narratives about decolonized land stewardship. For our and the understanding of future observers alike — even if it will only show how life tried to make sense of itself in the twenty-first century — comic books, cartoons, and animal characters deserve closer inspection and a place as relevant archival ephemera.
Works cited:
Kowalewski, H. 2018. Heart is for Love: Cognitive Salience and Visual Metonymies in
Comics. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8(1): 10, pp. 1–19, DOI:
McLuhan, M. 2019. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University.
Barthes, R. “Mythologies.” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, translated and printed 1972, original text 1954.
Eady, Kimberley. Scrolling Through the Motions. University of Ottawa. Ottawa, 2019.
McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.
Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and
Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” (SubStance 40. no. 1. 2011).
Bush kills off hopes for G8 climate change plan | Environment ( The Guardian, June 2007).
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: O Books, 2009.
Pfaller, Robert. “Interpassivity and Misdemeanors. The Analysis of Ideology and the Zizekian Toolbox”, (Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 261, no. 3, 2012)
Geerdts, M.S. (Un)real animals: Anthropomorphism and early learning about animals. Child Development Perspectives. (2016).
[written for ART 3364 / Professor Anna Paluch]
22 October 2021
Twelve Images from I can’t stand to see you cry, by Rahim Fortune (2021)
In the year 2020, social and other media platforms became a new beast adapting to a new world. These virtual spaces were a crucial source of connection, and as a result they seemed to fill with stories and photographs differently. The current events and anecdotal experiences available at our fingertips became one. Although it can have varied effects on public understanding, this sense of mobile intimacy presents an interesting opportunity to the photographic medium and can be explored further through the contemporary photo artist. In the text On Photography, Susan Sontag describes “photography’s ultra-mobile gaze” as though it is its own entity; one that has the power to impact but also create “a false sense of ubiquity”(1), which might echo the strain many felt connecting through images almost exclusively in 2020. For the photo artist however, making work through the confines of the past year may have been an opportunity to explore the relationship between the photographic object and viewer in new ways.
Like many during the pandemic, New York based photographer Rahim Fortune returned home and soon after would need to remain home for some time. Fortune continued his work from his local Austin community, and the resultant images comprise Fortune’s new photobook, I can’t stand to see you cry (2021). The twelve images viewable on AnOther Mag dot com (2) from I can’t stand to see you cry comprise a tender and visceral selection. Fortune recounts this time spent with family through their experience of illness predating but nevertheless compounded by covid-19. According to Graham Clarke in the text The Photograph, how the photographic object affects the public or viewer might depend upon where a viewer approaches the image from (3), and in viewing Fortune’s work through the RGB screen of a phone, the cool heft in one’s palm suddenly feels like that of a hand returning the embrace. Although the physical photobook may not reflect the order of the images viewable on AnOther Magazine, this selection begins with two figures standing in front of a one story home with white siding, one person faces the camera with arms around the other whose face is unseen, enveloped by the embrace. Put more plainly, the selection opens with focused attention and a hug. The image itself contains triangle formations made by the figures, the peak of the home, as well as the shadows cast by their presence in the space which meets the edge of the background at what might be the foot of the house’s front door, creating a sense of shared stability overlaid with a slight sense of looming.
The sequential images follow suit: a small table and fold away chairs present a place to sit with company while the space remains empty, surrounded by old car tires, a scene of the outdoors and scrap materials ring back to the escapes built forts brought to one’s youth. Figures too seem to exist outside of time, as three young individuals ride on horseback past gas station signs, their juxtaposition is pushed further when placed in relation to the unused tires of the previous image. The people connect in different ways—jovial faces go by on horseback, but in the next image we are presented with two figures standing in profile view, once again in an embrace. In this image, the figures are against an entirely black background as the two face away from the camera towards the darkness together. The following, an image of a wheat field with two stalks as the main subject among many fading into the background, complimenting and reverberating the sequential images of objects as the subject of bending or vulnerability comes to mind. There is the distinct tender imagination and tentative air of life in a sleepy small town. Horses painted on a barn in an otherwise empty field, imagery of crosses either welcome or alert caution; a railway crossing ‘X’ angled in a shot stands firmly outside an aged home at its gate; an image of fresh stitches echo the cruciform and the tracks; mending the flesh of a forearm tattoo outline of Texas that had succumb to a injury straight down its middle. Fortune’s sister and father return the gaze of the viewer in a moment of shared eye contact. The transitive (4) force of Fortune’s photographic choices create a story, and as the viewer comes to the end of the images we meet his father’s eyes between the medical devices assisting his breath, the vertical tube reveals holding hands.
Fortune’s father is pictured as through the arduous disease process of ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which ultimately took his life. The title ‘I can’t stand to see you cry’ references the song by The Whatnauts from 1973—a favourite of Fortunes father who was a musician himself—and compounds both the loss of someone close to the artist and the life captured throughout each of his images. In closing, I can’t stand to see you cry demonstrates something about grief and the human condition; the familiar and the tenuous. As Roland Barthes states in the 1980 text Camera Lucida, “photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs”(5). As presented by AnOther as a highly personal portrait of the deep south, it is clear that Fortune’s images of portraits, objects, and spaces blend the personal and documentary, but it is in the space between the two that these images exist and connect to create a larger communion and homage to a very personal yet shared experience of life.
Works cited:
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1977. Pp. 81.
Ashleigh Kane. I Can't Stand to See You Cry. AnOther (Rahim Fortune, May 4, 2021),
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/gallery/11715/i-cant-stand-to-see-you-cry/10
Graham Clarke. The Photograph. Oxford University Press. 1997.
David Joslit. Painting Beside Itself, October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. 2009. Pp. 125–134.
Roland Barthes. Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. New York: Hill and Wang. 1981.
INSTALLATION
feedback, 2018
THE CARLINGTON
PARK MAZE PROJECT
Final maze design
Process
When site inspection and planning began, one local man said he had been walking the perimeter of the land daily for more than twenty years. We talked about the remains from the former ski hill, the mostly veiled history of this patch of land, and whether I could safely interrupt it. What is missing from the above documentation is that the city of Ottawa is in control of this space due to the 24,000,000 gallon water reservoir beneath the soil, and so a shortcoming of this project might be my lack of engagement with local officials. The maze design, although only present for a brief time and limited in size, aimed to encourage questioning and a deeper engagement with our local natural spaces, and was removed in May 2021. The space remains wide open and lacks signage for park-goers regarding any indication of city planning, or its history. If the city of Ottawa does ever engage with the land above their reservoir further, my hope is that they collaborate with local Elders, honour the un-ceded territory, and ultimately only use the space in a way that promotes eco-diversity and community education.
A special thanks to the moderators of urbsite.blogspot.com and their 2012 account of this space for providing a window into its urban history, and to everyone who helped along the way.
